 Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming. My name is Paul Riber. I'm Chief Justice. I really appreciate all of you who have made the effort to be here. You are our, I think, seventh county. Is that right, Terry? That sounds right. I think that's right. Seventh county. We've been all over the state. We started in Madison County last August, I think it was. We've been down to Bennington. We've been up to Essex County, where we had a group not much smaller than this, I have to tell you. It was a good session. One of the things I love about this project that we've been doing, Gary Franklin and Terry Corsones and I, is these historic buildings around the state where we've had these meetings. I see the pledge that is memorialized on the wall over there from back in 1912, when I guess this structure was built. Everybody chipped in 23 bucks, as I read it, and the property was purchased. And Pete Seeger's over here on this side. So I love the fact that we're in these historic places. With me is Judge Mary Teachout. Judge Teachout is the presiding judge in Washington County. This is the form that we've followed in all the counties around the state. Every county has a presiding judge. Next to Mary is Gary Franklin. Gary is the president of the Vermont Bar Association. And Heidi Groff is at the other end. And Heidi is president of the Washington County Bar Association. This project started, well, let me just back up one step. I've been meeting with the leadership of the VBA for a number of years. Every month we have a meeting. And when the new president of the association comes in, we have sort of a kickoff meeting and decide, talk about what we're both interested in. It turned out when Gary Franklin came into office last summer, I think it was, we both had the same interest, which was to try to do a community outreach project, a project where we would invite people from the local community to come in and talk to us about the courts, talk to us about the profession. No agenda. We have no agenda here other than to answer questions and provide information and hear your comments about those subjects. We can't talk about cases, of course. So specific questions about particular cases are really, that's something that we're not at liberty to discuss, but we're certainly interested to hear what you have to say. So again, I want to thank you for coming out this afternoon. And I'll let my friend Gary Franklin make a few comments, and then we'll see where we go from there. Great. Thank you, Chief. As I just heard, I'm the president of the Vermont Bar Association. My name is Gary Franklin. And the way the Bar Association works is it has a board of managers which sort of oversees the outreach for the association. And then we have a rotating presidency where you get a one-year term as the president and then you get to serve as past president and kind of a three-year cycle of president-elect president, past president. So this is my year. And I was delighted to hear the Chief wanting to do this community outreach because I thought it was very important. And you see a lot of things in the news about people really needing to understand civics so that we could have hopefully a more thoughtful and more productive discourse than sometimes it seems to do that we're having. The Vermont Bar Association is very committed to access to justice. So that means providing services to the public and providing services to its members to try to get people to connect. You'll see on the table back there, we've put together a list. Terry Corzon is our executive director who's highly involved in all of this. He's put together a list of pro bono and low bono services. So these are services that are established through the Vermont Bar Association or promoted by the Vermont Bar Association to help people that can't otherwise afford lawyers. And it's important that you know what those services are. So I encourage you to take that. We also have these green cards for the Vermont Lawyer Referral Service. So when people go to court, they're not sure what to do. They like to call a lawyer. They don't know where to start. This is one place to start. We have green cards with phone numbers for the Vermont Bar Association's lawyer referral service. One of the things that we'd also like to really understand is what people think about legal services and what people think about the court system. Is it working? Is it not working? We'd like to hear what people think so that we can try to respond to that. There's clearly a disconnect out there in the world between people who need lawyers and lawyers who need clients. There are a lot of people going to court now without representation. And you find that county by county, state by state, nationwide, there are a lot of people. Some of it's just a self-help culture. That's part of it. But part of it is people just not knowing where to turn or whether they can afford it. And there's clearly, as I said, a bit of a disconnect. So we'd like to hear a little bit more why. If you can share your experiences or if you have questions, we'd love to hear them. The Vermont Bar Association is really happy to be able to provide this kind of forum for these kinds of discussions. So thanks so much for coming and we'd love to hear from you. Okay. Thanks, Gary. I want to give Judge Teach out a hiding chance to say a few words if you're interested or we can open it up for questions. Well, it's my privilege to be the presiding judge here in Washington County for a third year. But here we are in a historic building, so I'll give you a little historic perspective. I'm not from Washington County, but my husband was born in Washington County and grew up here. I have several children and grandchildren who now live here. But I first sat in the family court in Barrie about 25 years ago. And at that time, I spent four days a week doing family cases, divorce and parentage and juvenile, and one day a week at the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury doing mental health cases. Now it's very different. One day a week doing mental health cases is no longer done out of the family court in Barrie. It's done out of the civil court in Montpelier. And the family court judge is really overwhelmed with cases of all types. The opioid crisis has had a big effect. And there have been changes in the law that have brought many, many more cases. So there's been a real shift in that docket. And I first sat in the civil division where I am now in Montpelier about 20 years ago. And at that time, we had a lot of trials. It was just routine to have trials. And there were very few evictions or foreclosures. But a lot of things have changed since then as a result of the financial crisis and the aftermath and the way the society is structured now. We have, and mediation came in so that in cases if they're going to go to a jury trial or a lengthy court trial, they generally go to mediation first. And mediation has had a huge impact. We don't have so many trials anymore. Lots and lots of cases settle in mediation. I think it's more cost effective for people and also people can forge an agreement or a resolution themselves. But on the other hand, we have lots of evictions and foreclosures and collection of debt cases. And for those cases, almost automatically, people can't afford a lawyer. And as you were saying, there are just lots of cases now where people cannot afford a lawyer and could do with legal services. We do hand out the green cards and the Vermont Bar Association has developed a lot of programs that they didn't have 20 years ago to help people try to get access to lawyers. Legal Aid does a workshop when we do evictions so that people can get some legal help on those days too. So those have been positive developments. But those are just some of the changes that we've seen over time in this specific county. And I think that it'll be interesting to see how things evolve but don't see it happening anytime soon that a lot more people will have legal help unless we continue to work on programs to make that available. Thanks, Judge Hardy. I am most interested in hearing any questions that you all have. I'm happy to answer questions. I'm the local attorney. I've been practicing in Montpelier now for 20 years. And we have a small organization of about 40 attorneys that regularly come and the local judges and we do talk about topical things and we love to hear from the judges about local practice and things that are going on. But we love, I think, in this forum to answer any questions that you might have, I think this is very mysterious for a lot of people, the court system and what do lawyers do and what kind of problems can be resolved in the court system. And so I'd much rather hear from you than to spend my time telling you about myself. Okay, thank you. All right, so we'll open it up for questions and for comments about the justice system, courts, the legal profession. Anyone have anything they'd like to bring up? Well, this will be a quick meeting. Oh, yes, sir. Yes, in the blue tie back there. So folks in the audience will know I'm not exactly a plant, but I am a judge and I work for all these people. But we really have four different perspectives here and I'm just curious briefly what each one of you thinks is the biggest challenge before the judiciary at this point in time. I'll start by saying I think that it's something that Judge Tichoud alluded to, which is the number of cases we're seeing that are opiate-related, addiction-related. It started out as impacting on the criminal docket and now it's in the, very much in the family docket, child protection cases specifically. We've run out of guardians ad litem in some counties. The number of lawyers that are doing this work is challenging at best so that scheduling cases and the continuation of cases is very, very difficult. It can be very, very difficult. We're not actually able to keep up with the incoming case flow in some counties. In one county in particular, a couple years ago, we added a courtroom to try to keep up with the numbers and immediately got pushed back from the sheriff, from the state's attorney, from the public defender's office, from the Department of Children and Families, all of them saying, you know, if you're going to start handling more cases through this courthouse, we're not equipped to meet more numbers going through. So that is the top thing on my list these days and I'll let Judge T. Chow pick it up from there if she has anything. Well, I've already mentioned the need that people have for legal advice and people don't always need to have a lawyer representing them all the way through a case in court from beginning to end. Sometimes they just need advice. They need to understand what their options are and some help in making a choice. And the court system is not really set up to do that. When I became a lawyer, I started working for a lawyer whose sign was attorney and counselor at law and the counseling role giving advice and educating people about what the law is that pertains to their situation and helping them figure out what to do is a big role that attorneys can really help play and people come to the court sometimes hoping that the court will do that for them and we can't. So we, as I said before, I think a big challenge is helping people get the information they need to help them make sometimes very difficult decisions in their life. It's a great question and one of the ways that we try to address the problem that Judge T. Chow just raised again is like these lawyer referral services and the ability to what do you do? What's your first stop? Hopefully we can get the word out effectively that it can be the Vermont Bar Association to at least connect you to somebody even if it's for just a consultation which is sometimes all you need is an hour just to try to understand where you even began, what do you do? But really to directly answer your question, Judge Gerson, I guess I would have, I'd answer it in two ways, sort of from a tactical and a strategic standpoint. Sort of the more, the immediacy seems to be one of resources and the Chief has touched on it in terms of the challenges that are brought to the courts which is where courts are almost sort of addressing social services type issues and there need to be more resources. And I should point out that there's, for those of you that don't know and some of you obviously do, that there's really two different court systems. We've got the federal system and the state system and we're dealing today here really with the state system like what's going on with the state of Vermont. But there's a federal system and there's a federal jurisdiction here in Vermont and I practice in both courts, federal and state. And when you're in the federal court, you can feel the difference. You can recognize the difference in terms of what resources, how resources matter. In terms of the ability for the judges to have clerks and people who are assisting the process, not just for the number of judges but the number of support staff and people that work on cases. It helps cases go through. It helps get sometimes a better thoughtful process for each case and when you look at our budget in Vermont, it's a fraction for the judiciary as to what it is for the other branches of government and so resources, I think the court system is getting what it's asking for more or less but it seems that that can be made more robust. The system could be more robust. The other thing just from a more long term thinking which is really critical is just civics, civics education and the fear I have is that at some point somebody is going to go, they're going to go to court with a traffic ticket or something and they're going to argue the ticket. The judge is going to say, sorry, you've got to pay your ticket and they're just going to walk out and say, whatever. I'm not listening to what he or she said and they just start to ignore what happens. It's a social contract we live under, right? You know what? You go to court and things happen and rulings are made and you abide by the law and when people don't even know that a court system exists or they don't understand what the different branches of government do or I think it's a real issue. They don't really know what their rights are and it's just another voice at telling them what to do that they may decide to agree with or may decide not to agree with and that's a real threat to our system and so the way to really combat that is through civics, civics education. So I just want to follow up on something that Judge Sheichel said also because I think that it's very difficult for people to find attorneys a lot of the time. There is the lawyer referral service through the VBA and there is also Vermont Legal Aid is a resource that people can use. I think it's a lot about connecting people with resources and information. The Judiciary website is very robust. I can tell you that it's improved a lot in the time that I've been practicing where people who are not attorneys can get some information online about what's going to happen in court. There's a wonderful, wonderful page about small claims court in Vermont that's very helpful, that has all the forms on it that tells people what their expectations should be. The family court in Vermont has been over the years, many, many years been made much more user friendly in terms of the clerks will show you what forms you need if you have a custody issue going on or a divorce going on or child support or something like that. But as we've been talking about, the court system itself is not really set up to advocate for people and to be that resource. But I think that there are programs that are available on the VBA is a great place to start. I know that when I was a baby lawyer, I came over and volunteered in the family court. There was a half day, I think, and we split it up to give people information about representing themselves in their divorces. And we even served as mediators through the program. And there's some of that that goes on still. There's some that goes on for small claims court. There are programs that people can get involved in and there are resources that people can tap into. But it's about doing research online and trying to figure out what's available locally. I think these low bono projects are great. There's some limited representation that some attorneys will do in certain cases. And I think it's important to realize that not every attorney works on an hourly basis. So sometimes I hear when people come to meet with me, is this going to be really expensive before they even come in the door? They want to make sure that they're not going to be making a bad choice and, you know, owe a bunch of money. And a lot of attorneys work on a contingency fee or a fee that's an hourly contingency depending on the outcome. So I think it's about information. It's about letting people know that there's other resources out there to get into court. I think a few years ago I would have said one of the biggest challenges is just getting all the cases heard in the amount of time. But the dockets have really shrunk since mediation, since alternative dispute resolution. Many, many more cases are being resolved outside of the court system. And so I think that is much better for people than it has been in the past. Okay, does that bring up any burning questions here? Does anyone have a comment about what you've heard? Yes? I don't want to use the floor if anyone else has questions. That's all right. We should go ahead. I was just thinking if we could imagine a docket without an opioid crisis in Vermont. And what I wonder is, it's easy to view that as a criminal problem and a court problem, which is how we do, but could it be perhaps more productively viewed as a mental health, public health kind of issue? And when we talk about strains on resources, as Gary was mentioning, I totally appreciate the rule of law concern that underlined your comments. But I wonder, is there like a bigger way of looking at helping the judiciary by just shifting a lot of the opioid issue thinking to a public health issue? For example, and I'll finish here in a minute. It used to be that the best predictor of whether a child would finish high school was how that child was performing in the sixth grade. Now we're down to the second grade. That's the best predictor of whether a child will finish high school. And it's because of truancy. Because second graders are missing school because they're at home taking care of younger siblings or mom or dad who's not taking care of themselves. And so I just wonder if there's some kind of big picture of thinking where we can actually help the judiciary by treating people not as criminals but as people who need help. And kind of approach the allocation of resources from that perspective. As you know, I've been thinking about this for a long years. And I'm still thinking about it. Well, you know, one of the things I would say is that I think Vermont is ahead of most states in the country. And this is not, the opioid problem is not specific or unique to Vermont. It's a problem that states and courts and social services are facing all across the country. So we're not alone in this by any means. But one of the things that we've done when Governor Shumlin was in office was to start this hub and spoke model of treatment, which is really in the vanguard of states across the country that are trying to address what is not only a very difficult problem in terms of recidivism, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but also because of the nature of addiction and addiction-related behavior. But one of the challenges I think we face in this state that is not easy to address is the rural nature of our communities by and large. And so when you think about that, what you're really talking about is are places that are fairly isolated in terms of services, availability of services for treatment, are places that are isolated in terms of the availability of public transportation. And so the notion of having, and again, this is a challenge exactly the same that many other states I hear about are facing as well. But this model, I think, is innovative in trying to bring services even to remote areas. The problem with recidivism and addiction-related behavior, whether you're talking about in the criminal sense or in a family law sense, is something that really is a struggle to address. And I think, you know, there are many, again, I think we're doing a very good job with pre-trial courage. The Attorney General, Josh Diamond, is here. The Attorney General's office has the, what is it, Josh from Memorial County that is- Community Justice Program. And I actually was up there with Judge Meersen and Terry Scott who's here as well to observe about two weeks ago. And it's phenomenal what they're doing. You know, so they've got a docket call on a given day with a whole broad range of crimes that are being arranged. Different people are being arranged on those crimes. And they actually have the services in the courtroom. As soon as the arrangement happens, the people who provide the service who do triage to try to get these folks involved in treatment follow them right out of the courtroom and interview them outside in the hallway and try to get them engaged in services. Now, this isn't a system that applies to all kinds of crimes, of course, but the notion that we need to try to address, you know, recidivating offenders who are committing low-level crimes that are really related more to their addiction than to anything else, these are people that we've got to figure out how to deal with outside the criminal justice system. And this is what that project is doing, and it's really quite impressive. But I'll stop, because Judge D. Judd's got more experience about this than I do. Well, the person who has more experience is Judge Morrissey, who's sitting in the front row. I don't want to put you on the spot, but you might have some observations like through your long experience in criminal courts and seeing this opioid crisis now. Yes. Yeah, so I currently preside here in Bairie under the criminal docket. I oversee the treatment court right now. I was a prosecutor in Burlington about 20, 21 years, and we started the RIC programs, Rapids Prevention Program in Burlington, which I think is sort of what TAMRA act and some of these other pre-trial programs are modeled on. It really is one design to intervene at a very early stage in the process. People tend to be most invested in the, if they commit an offense that day. You know, if you can talk to people that day and an offense has happened and try to get them engaged in services early on, you can usually, I think you can have a better outcome in terms of getting them engaged as opposed to waiting until they come to court two or three weeks later to respond to something. So that was part of the premise of that program. And now, I think we saw Ashley Hill, and I think I had a mystery. Councilor Jacobson, they're here as well. The state attorney's office here in Washington, and a lot of cases do get diverted out of the system now for these low level, more low. Some bars are low level, you think. But for people, offenses that really are getting motivated by drug use and substance use and interest substances, those are diverted out of the system. So we're not seeing those seeing the resources of the pro-justices are really being used for that purpose because they're getting diverted out. Now the treatment court is very different because you've got people who have committed much more serious offenses and the team is comprised of, I'm on it, we have a public defender on it, Mr. Majakis putting the state's attorney's office on it. We have mental health professionals, we have substitute professionals, DOC's on it. We've got law enforcement liaisons on it. So it really is this team approach and trying to provide support, accountability for people, and that many people who get to be held accountable to a significant degree for offenses in a very real time way. So that if a person, we see them every two weeks, sometimes more frequently when they're struggling. But the whole idea is to put very close tabs on these folks and to, as I said, sort of in real time respond to whatever their crisis is that may bring them back to using substance abuse. I think one thing that really sometimes can be overlooked is that many of the people who are addicted have significant trauma histories. They're people who may be the neglected, the people who get neglected 10, 15 years ago have now graduated to the criminal justice system and they have trauma histories. And until you really address, I think, what the trauma has been in our life that leads them to walk that escape in drugs, that leads them to say that, you know, reality's not something I want to be a part of, I'm happier when I'm using drugs. Until you resolve those underlying issues, I think it's very hard to have success. So that's why it's really important that we have a mental health component as part of the treatment court to provide that support and have people engage, not just in having clean ways, but also address those underlying issues. The goal here is not to have short-term success, but rather long-term success. And from my perspective, until you address those underlying issues that originally brought them to drug use, you really, I'm not sure that you can have long-term success. So I agree that the opioid crisis has permeated every docket. There's the juvenile docket, the criminal docket, the family docket. Many people who come into family court and they're having issues with their family, that's substance use-related. And then the family docket, you don't have that same level of resources. If it's the juvenile docket, you have DCF. There's the criminal docket, you've got DOC. The family docket, you don't really have that level of resources. So I do think that this is something that needs to be addressed on a widespread way. But I do think that progress is usually made. I think that the state's turning it up. I don't think there's any divernal, a lot of things about that have substance use issues, two programs in the community. So I think that the criminal justice system should not, perhaps, be the center point for that occurrence. I think in reality, that's where it occurs. I just might add to the, I would say the legislature's very tuned into this problem and they're trying to address it. And we're working with them extensively to try to partner with other arms of government in bringing solutions to the problem. But it's not an easy problem to fix. And what I've said to them a number of times is, you know, if there was one thing you could do to try to address this problem, it would have been done already. The fact is that it needs solutions from a number of different points of view. Different entities, prosecutors, defense lawyers, social workers, as well as the courts. So it's just not an easy problem. And as the judge was talking, she's making the point that I think it's very important, which is that intervention and effective intervention is really what's key in early intervention. And that's a very difficult thing to do. And I think that's one of the struggles that we're having right now. In the last two years, we've had to organize the legislative days at the courthouse and they've come and asked multiple questions about the drug courts. They've attended drug court to try to figure out how to get a handle on, you know, maybe having, I don't know how many drug courts there are currently in the state of Vermont, but certainly not every county has a drug court. I mean, I think this is pretty... Burleigh has one, Washington has one, Rutland has one, and then Windsor has a DWI court. And then pregnant county has a DWI court, much smaller. Right. But I think they are headed in that direction. They want to know numbers. They want to know how much success it's seen. I think those things are sometimes difficult to measure, but... I think they are. Is there any program like that for non-drug related first-party offenders? Non-drug related. So yes, diversion. So you mean somebody who just goes and steals something because they're... Yes, yes. Yes, diversion. Well, there is that in all counties? I have to think that every county has diversion. I used to be a deputy state's attorney, and we commonly would get cases sent up to us. Usually they're misdemeanors to qualify, but occasionally they'll be a felony if it's non-violent. That could be considered for diversion. And the qualifications are usually that somebody has not been previously convicted. And the state's attorney will review the information and the record with the investigating agency, the police, and certain cases were offered diversion. What that means is sometimes they have a more restorative justice kind of bet. They may, in order to successfully complete diversion, they may be asked to write a letter of apology or attend a class to learn more about the particular offense or the particular issue at hand. But I think that opportunity is commonly offered in what we call low-level offenses, misdemeanors, and a lot of times people take it and then they actually don't have a record of that experience. So that's nice. It gives them another chance. So is there an age limit for that? There's not. And I just mentioned that somebody talked about truancy and the importance of kids getting to school. That's where the community justice and the community restorative justice centers come in. The one that the chief was referring to in LaMoyle County. They gave us an incredible number. So LaMoyle County's a fairly small county, but I think it covers three school districts. And there was several hundred kids who were truant, and they sent the letters home after 10 days and after 20 days. And with that case management out of LaMoyle County, I think she said only in the end was it three cases and ended up actually having to get to the court system. So they were able to work with those families and get things back on track for getting kids to school. So I think that's something that communities should look into as far as having to restore the centers. They're important. One of my questions is many other states have a domestic violence court similar to the setup as the drug treatment court. And I'm wondering if the LaMoyle County area has ever considered that or what that would look like if there's an opinion on that being something that would happen in the future. What do you think the domestic violence court looks like? Yeah, well many other states have it and it's a very similar model to the drug treatment court where offenders who are charged with domestic assault come back regularly to make sure that they are following their conditions of release and that they're getting those services that they need so that they're not just sent back into their community with conditions of release, signing up for failure, that they will probably eventually violate their conditions or the RFA. We do want to become you have the domestic violence document, the RFA document, but many other states also have specific domestic violence courts to the criminal side. Let me ask my friend Judge Pearson to respond to that. So the short answer is we used to have a domestic violence document. Actually there was one down in Bennington that cooperated for about two or three years. We have a rotation system so judges will only stay in court for a limited period of time and rotate out. They were quite successful in that court, but it took a real collaborative effort to prosecute from the defense attorney and service providers to make that work. I think the sense was that once the judge who started that court and was very investment and left and went to another county, parts of that program continued for maybe a year or two years after, but it was really the personality of that judge that drove that court. When he went across the state to the Windham area, they started the court there. It was not as successful. Unfortunately he was in the process of retiring when he was trying to start the court, so it didn't have the support in the background that he had by being in the other court for three years. It was successful. But my sense was that not everybody was buying into it and it was unfortunate, but we tried to sustain it even after he left, but after about a year or so. Everybody wasn't working together. The only way any of these courts, whether it was the Stroke Treatment Court, as Judge Morrissey said, the DUI court, it has to be everybody buying into the concept or it doesn't work. Unfortunately it didn't work in the second. I would say that what came out was that there were some best practices. That's one of the goals of the court. We have done best practices down, particularly in the two areas that had the IDVD courts. We're taking those lessons and hoping to bring those to all of our courts. For those RFA days, those can be difficult days. So it's a work in progress to get it spread throughout this day. Next question. The problem with some of these courts is that most of them get started as pilot projects with grant funding. When you get to the end of the grant, if you can't sustain the program, they end and I think that's partially what happened in those other courts. The grants ran out and the courts were not self-sustaining. That's the difficulty we have in many of those courts. My question is in particular about family court for child protection cases. So we have many cases that are languishing for a long period of time in the court system. In 2018, more than 80 children were. Their case was closed when they had been an open case for more than three years. Region Act of 193 was set specifically to counter that. But for monoclein is within the snowball that we can't get out of because there's so many cases in the system already that can't close. Don't have time in the docket. Tourbies don't have time. Family service workers don't have time. It's a snowball of the fact that you will and more and more cases. I know you talked about that you tried to open a courtroom in one county and it just didn't work. It worked. It took more than just additional funding for the court. It took more than additional space, additional courtroom space. That was really my point. I understand. I'm curious what the plan is for that. If it's county sharing, some counties have a higher case load than others. What are the possibilities that we have to help solve some of that issue? I feel like the case load is just growing because we can't close any of the cases that are in the system. We're going back every six months carrying in nothing is progressing, but there is no room in the docket to schedule times for further hearings. I'm just curious what is really the plan about. We know what the problem is. We know how it's multifaceted and there's many pieces that are dependent on. I'm just wondering what is the plan? What is happening to solve that problem? I'm aware that there's a backlog that's growing in this county and I think it's a real concern and I think there are a number of different reasons for it. It's not a cooking cutter system that we work in. This is not we're not making widgets. We're not mass producing justice. What we're doing is we're using human resources which involves human judgment. The best judgment that we can bring to the problems informed by education and the structure of the law, of course, to resolve cases. But it's not just a judge who applies those skills to a particular case. It involves staff who work on intake of cases and the management of cases. It involves lawyers who come into the courtroom. You know, I'll tell you a quick story. One of the things I had practiced law in Bruntman County for almost 30 years when I was appointed to the Supreme Court. I thought I knew. I was a trial lawyer. I thought I knew everything there was to know about courts in this state because I practiced in every single county. In the first administrative meeting I was in in Montpelier I was sitting next to a great judge who just passed away recently, Frank McCaffrey, who at that time was doing what Judge Gerson does. He announced that he was the chief administrative trial judge for the state. I knew him very well. He was from my hometown. I known him for a long time. And here in this meeting he started talking about the culture in a particular county as a basis for, as an explanation for what was going on in the county with respect to case law. And I remember turning it and he was sitting where Mary is right now and I said what are you talking about culture? There's no distinction between one county and another. And I've learned since then that culture is very much a factor in how cases are managed. We are doing everything we can to make sure that every county and the case law in every county is handled exactly the same way. But this idea of culture and the human dimension that comes into managing case law and deciding cases to managing a courtroom to what the prosecutors, what the public defenders, what the private counsel, what the government counsel are doing is very important in trying to define what answers to a problem like this one would be. So I'm not giving you a short answer to this and I'm not going to tell you that there's one black and white sort of fix. It's a complicated problem and believe me we're well aware of it and we're working on it. Now there are others here who've got more detail about this than I do including the bald guy in front of you. Sorry. I'll get back to you. I'll find it out. So to answer your question, I need to go back a little bit to give you a little historical perspective how we've arrived at this point. And if you go back only about three or four years we really had what I referred to as a perfect storm. We had a case load of children and abuse that doubled. So we had increased filings. We had the opiate problem that everybody's talked about but the opiate problem has its own unique ebb and flow relapsed recovery which complicates the case and extends those timelines that you're talking about if you're going to give folks a fair chance to reunify. The third piece was over the time I've been in position for about four years. We've had a significant turnover in judges. At one point we had six vacancies. When you take judges out of the equation you're not going to get hearing times. And so it's taken this long and as of right now this is the first time we've ever had all of our judge vacancies filled. We have two vacancies right now that we're waiting for the governor to complete the process. If we can get those judges when you talk about a plan we recognize that some areas, some counties need help in certain documents. The Washington County right now has a significant number of chin's cases of children abuse and neglect and termination of parental rights cases. You talk about families waiting. We're waiting to get these cases heard. That's a very significant problem in their criminal document. What we hope to be able to do is with these additional vacancies is to target them into different areas so that they wouldn't be sitting in one court for a lengthy period of time. They might go to Washington County and hear termination cases. They might spend some time in a rotin to try to attack that and target that criminal backlog. But as the chief indicated we have to look around the state and for instance if I have a judge do you have the space to put them in that space then we have to be able to say do you have the staff and do you have the security to open up a courtroom. That's what it took up in Franklin where the chief was referring to but that literally took the legislature in one session to give us additional money to the state's attorney on this and allowed us to convert what was a conference room adjourned to a small court. So we have to look around and find out if we physically can actually open up another courtroom but we hope with these additional resources that we can start targeting some of these courts. That's the plan. I just hope no one retires on it. Otherwise I'm going to start all over again. I have a simple one more thing I want to be able to see it so I'm going to stand down but I can't see around the head so bold. He's trying. I was down in the county a few years ago meeting with legislators and they asked very similar question which you just asked because they were seeing they were hearing the legislators were hearing from their constituents about the backlog of cases that you're seeing down there and one of the things one of the truths of that situation and I think it's similar here was that we were pulling judges off of other dockets the divorce docket for instance to put them into places where we had a greater need for trying to keep up with the case flow. I think this is the kind of thing that happens county to county depending upon the ebb and flow of what kind of cases these CHIN's cases and the TBR cases are very complex as you probably know they're not simple cases they're not they're not single issue cases it's not unusual to see experts come in to testify about the capacity of a parent to parent a child these are very complex cases and we don't have this is one of the things I've been talking about in this lecture about dedicated resources county to county or region to region to address these cases and what that means is is that we wind up with hearings that start evidentiary hearings that start that don't finish within the timeframe that has been allowed for good reasons and then we try to schedule the continuation of the hearing and everybody of the lawyers say well I'm double booked I'm over here, I'm over here and all of a sudden you've got kids and this is one of the things is terrible to think about for me you've got kids parked in foster care while you're trying to get these cases done and my solution that I've suggested as I say to the legislature is dedicated resources that's going to cost money if you have regional teams of judges social workers lawyers, prosecutors and defenders and you grant it very similar to what we do with the environmental talking if you're familiar with that you know it's an essential location but the judge and the staff go out into the places to the courts where the conflict exists so the parties don't have to travel and they hear the cases there this is the kind of solution that I think the state needs to be looking at we've got not their attention because as of the last section they pointed up seven million dollars over three years and they want to see a wholesale revision not just to the court system and the justice system but to the child welfare system so they are actually talking in those terms and Judge Grusson is directly involved in that project anyway I am sorry I will say this I am sorry that the system is not addressing all the cases in a timely fashion in your county and I wish we had a good easy solution for it but you know it's a very difficult problem that we're facing right now and I assure you we're doing everything we can to try to address it so that I follow my sword I'll do it again if you want me to give me another question is that it you know it is six o'clock almost there's a meeting like no other meeting we've had in the other county I have to tell you do you have any questions well I was just going to make I was just going to make a comment and that is for those of you here who are not part of the court system here they work really hard and they're the ones who are on the front lawn usually at the counter dealing with people who are waiting for their hearing want to have a hearing want to have something happen can't afford the lawyer want some help they are the ones who are face to face with the public members of the public are having illustrations with shortness of resources so I just want to recognize the good work here here let me second that the staff that work in courts around this state are just unbelievable unbelievably dedicated and I found that they really care I've seen a lot of court staff go out of their way to try to answer questions to the public especially you know legal ones at times and they can't get into giving legal advice I think to the extent that I've seen them really go out of their way to try to help people and connect people with resources I'm really impressed I think that's something that's extraordinary okay thanks very much thank you