 Thank you. Okay, so let's look at our municipal. I don't even know what we could call limited. I'm calling it limited self-governance. You might put pilot in there. Well, maybe we don't want to pilot. Maybe we just want to increase limited self-governance. Anyway, I know what I'm referring to. Yeah, you do. So I will. Start the. Conversation by. Apologizing in no uncertain terms. To anybody that I may have offended the other day. When we were talking about this. And I seemed to. I was making. What could have been interpreted as. A rather snarky comments about. Some of the. Areas that we put in the. Municipalities could not venture into. And I made a rather. Unkind comment. About. Banking. And I should not have done that. I apologize to the banking community. They are. I love my local banks. And I did not mean any. Disrespect by. What I said. So. Given that. I understand they were listening with interest. All right. I won't make any more snarky comments ever again, because we'll get responses like that. Okay, but I do apologize. I did not mean in any way. To disparage anyone. Okay. So let's look at. This and I, I also am apologizing to the committee because I said, I would take a stab at rewriting the findings. And I have not had a chance to do that yet, but I promise I will by the end of the week or by the next time we take this up. Okay. Wow. I'd forgotten that you'd promised to do that. That was a big promise. I don't remember exactly where we were. Are we working. Off the draft on our. Yes. I know I have unfortunately made promises. Beyond my capacity to keep them. In this time and I. So. They're all lagging a little bit behind. Anyway, so let's go. I don't remember exactly where we were. Yeah. Yes. I guess. I have some. Concerns and I just want to ask Tucker. How this would work. When we, if we just said that they. Were not allowed to adopt or amend ordinances in conflict with. U.S. and Vermont constitutions, federal or state law. Does that not cover all of these things that we put. In there that we very specifically said, because there are state laws about. Health insurance and banking and utilities and. Crimes and criminal procedures. So this suggestion was actually brought up a few times in the Senate's discussion of S106. Last biennium. And the response is if the proposals cannot contain anything that is contrary to state law broadly, then they would effectively be barred from proposing anything. Because the entire point of this process is for them to. Propose some sort of authority that is not already available to them through state law. So title 24 and then any. Specific provisions of state law and any of the other titles. Would be inaccessible to them if they were not allowed to propose something that was inconsistent with state law broadly. So if you were to put in that they were not allowed to propose something that is inconsistent with state law. They would effectively not be able to propose. Anything unless it is. Something that state law is completely silent about. They're called more. Thank you, Madam chair. Okay. So how is that different from what's in the bill? There's an enumerated. I think the alphabet goes up to our. With things that they can't do. How is what you just said. Different from what's actually in the bill. Maybe I'm not understand. Because if there is anything in state law outside of those enumerated categories, then they would be able to propose them. You know, so for example, it calls out that they. Shall not propose anything that is inconsistent with state laws regulating alcoholic beverages, except that they may propose to increase municipal fee shares. So. So. What kinds of things are they likely to propose. That are against. That are in opposition to state law. I think if you were to take a look at any of the charter proposals that are coming up this year, I mean, that's what a charter. Proposal is essentially it's asking for special permission under a special set of state statutes to have legislative authority. So non-citizen voting and local elections in Montpelier. Upcoming a town meeting day. I believe that the city of Burlington is voting on just cause evictions. That is different than what is provided for in title nine. So. I mean, if you were just to take a look at what's being proposed right now outside of this program, you might get an idea of what inconsistent powers, municipalities are asking for. I'm looking at the list that a brow bro gave us last year. On street parking. Is there a law. On the books about on street parking. Or putting a stoplight stop sign on a. Town road. I wish that my statutory knowledge was so encyclopedic that I could answer those questions offhand. I'm surprised. Karen. So there are, thank you. There are rules, for instance, if you're, if you have a state highway going through town. Then on street parking, you couldn't just. Set up your own on street parking. Provisions. And there are rules about where stop signs need to be placed. And where speed signs need to be placed. I mean, if you get into AOT. Ashtow's signage, there's more rules than you can shake a stick at, but. So I'm going to send you sort of the list that we had put together last year. And so you can look at that. I guess. All right. I know that they're, they are. And unless they are. There's a law that prohibits them. From doing it is, is it a state law? I mean, I. Is there a state law right now that says that a town can't put a stop sign on a town street. There might be a rule. But is there a law that says that. Or is there a law that says. Is there a law that says that a town can't put a stop sign on a town street. Let's see. General obligation bonding for a municipal broadband broadband network. That they can't do that. Is there a law that says they can't do that? I mean. So. Am I muted? No. There's not, there's not a law that says. There's not a law that says that a town can't put a stop sign on a town street. There are laws that constrain the way you do those things. And where you. Have to get approval from. But I guess my. The question I'm asking here is that. If somebody said, we're going to, if some town. Said in this pilot, we're going to. Make it a crime. In this way. If they said, we're going to make it a crime. That would have to go through both the. This commission that's set up and the legislature for approval in there. But they're doing so. Why are we so worried. That they're going to be. And. And if they did want to. Make that new crime in town. In an ordinance and there's a $25 fine for wearing red on Thursdays. I mean, does the state care is my question? I guess. I want to pass this with the least possible categories of exemptions as possible. Yes, Senator Clarkson. I have a suggestion. Why don't we flip it around and say, as long as there's no conflict with state law, towns can do what they'd like. I mean, as long as it's not in direct conflict with state law, and then you could get rid of having to exempt all the little individual things and instead make it permissible rather than you can't do all these 88 things, I mean, why not flip it around and put the burden on them for finding out if it's if they can't do it or not? I think Tucker already answered that question at the beginning. I'm sorry. Did he? When? Yeah. I mean, not exactly. He answered it in a certain kind of way. If you said not in conflict with state law, that would leave us with nothing because everything is in conflict with state law the way things are written. To be able to do anything. I mean, we have it. We have in state law, we have in Title 17, that they can have three select board members or five, but they can't have four or six and that they can't. And if they have five, they have to have one three-year term and two two-year terms. We, that's state law. We should just butt out of those things, but that is a state law. So if they decided that they wanted to have four select board members. So when Hartford went to seven, which I think they have now, that was a charter change. It must have been. Right. I mean, like a great example of just coming up is like town meeting, right? And like one of the most frustrating things for town meeting is that, you know, it's on a set date and you, but if you want to move it, you can only move it to these set dates, right? So like we're very prescriptive about how you can move your dates. But if you want to do anything else, maybe weeks later, you have to go through a whole charter process. You can look at things like, you know, Robert rules of order being the order of what you have to use to control your town meeting. Why? In this day and age, why? It's complicated, it's convoluted. Why are we saying that it has to be done that way? I mean, there's so many little things that are buried in statute that become really prescriptive, that don't make sense. And the problem is when you go in front of, I'm not your committee, because you guys are great, but some government operations committee, maybe in a different chamber, that you put proposals through to change these little nuances in state statute. It becomes this huge conversation where it's going to impact every community the same way regardless of size. And that's why, you know, charters are great because you can kind of like craft it to be what a town needs. But the part of that is that it's set in stone and there's no flexibility there, just the same way any state law is. And so, you know, unless the legislature becomes less prescriptive in how they update statutes or stay on top of statutes, you know, I mean, if we're gonna be a Dylan's rule state, it makes sense that our parents, our legislature parents, would be on top of our statutory obligations and those sorts of things that we are always having to look back at laws that haven't changed in forever and wonder why, why are we still in this? And it's always us bringing it before the legislature to update. And sometimes it kicks us, you know, in the backside as the conversations get a little wily and it turns into something, you know, we don't really necessarily want. I mean, I brought it up several times but bringing up a proposal to deal with blighted properties and communities. And, you know, God forbid a town adopts an ordinance that, you know, deals with blighted properties. And, you know, a few years back in the House Government Operations Committee, they were concerned about, well, God forbid a town were to say, you know, you had to cut your grass at a certain inch level. And just because there was that fear of some town somewhere doing it that way, no town was gonna be able to get that authority. So I think the bigger question here is like you have a charter process which is good but it's not great. It's not super flexible. It doesn't allow for creativity and ingenuity. It doesn't allow for a lot of flexibility. And the whole idea with this pilot is to put something out there, make everyone feel safe and secure that they're not opening the floodgates and see where it leads us. And I also, you know, the conversation, what was it last week or the week before, about, you know, why aren't the Government Operations Committee looking through the lens of how does this charter provision make sense maybe at a broader scale? Like why are we just limiting said XYZ charter provision to this one community? Does it make sense to open it to other communities as well? I think that's a great idea. And I think that would be, I don't know how you would legislate that, but it sounds like something that would be really beneficial to all communities to at least have you had the legislature again who are our parents under our state constitution on look more holistically about these things. And so I'll leave it at that. So one other example, if I'm, one other example is actually a bill that's in the House Transportation Committee right now and would allow towns to do traffic coming and pedestrian safety and on their main streets, if their main street, you know, it goes through a village and it's a state highway. Again, the state highway issue, but there's a lot of people who's very interested in that. And that's coming out of Waitsfield where somebody was actually killed in the, by a crosswalk last year. So how to crosswalk or in it? They were killed in the crosswalk, not by the crosswalk. Did I say by the crosswalk? Sorry. I had a vision of the crosswalk coming up and, you know, doing, and we've had the same in Woodstock. So I'm going to make a couple of comments. We, in Putney, we tried to get a crosswalk on the, on route five where it goes through the village. And what we were told by transportation is why would we put a crosswalk there? There's nowhere to go from anywhere else. I mean, which wasn't true, but they couldn't see that people needed to be able to cross the street there. But I just, I'm always blown away by when I start thinking about this because the way the federal government works is anything that isn't prohibited by the federal government, the states are allowed to do. And if we in Vermont thought that it would be, the way we treat our towns is the way the federal government would treat us, we would be up in arms. So we just don't, we just don't trust our local people. That is the bottom line. And I don't know how to get us there. Senator Colomer. Thank you, Madam Chair. I agree with you, by the way. I think this whole committee does, we've always tried to craft something that would help our municipalities. I'm curious back, and I was around at the time, how did Church Street in Burlington get closed? Was that by charter or was that something that somehow we allowed to happen? And Karen just mentioned some traffic calming situations. Rutland's just done that on a couple of streets that go right through the downtown. I don't remember any charter for Rutland City. So they must have come up with some way to get around whatever regulations they needed to in order to do that. They've built out little, I don't know what you call them, but you can't, there used to be four lanes, now it's two. So it slows the traffic down. How did all that come about? Church Street up in Burlington and the most recent examples in the Rutland? Well, I would have to go back and double check on Church Street, but I believe that was a... Actually, they worked with the federal government on that and there may have been community development entitlement funding or even UDAG funding. I have to go back and check. And then in Rutland, if it's on a local street, they have the city has more authority and they may also have more authority in their charter. Then a town that's regulated only by the statutes, but there's a definite difference between a local street and a numbered state highway. Well, I think in Rutland's case, it was both. Setter Street, which is probably a city road, which goes from the top of Route 7 down into the downtown area was changed, but so was West Street, which in essence is Route 4. And there was a piece of that that was changed too. I don't want to get into the weeds here, but I'm just curious. It seems like sometimes it's okay to do it and sometimes it isn't. If you checked, you may find that it took them a long, long time to do it because they had to work with the agency of transportation because I know that there was an instance in Brattleboro where they wanted to put a stop sign on a street and it made perfect sense. And everybody who lived there and traveled there and was in Brattleboro knew that there should be a stop sign there, but it took a long, long time because they had to do traffic studies and agency of transportation had to do a lot of stuff. They finally got the stop sign, but took a long time. So where do we go with this committee? Hi. Where are we? What should we do? Well, Selena. I'm not sure. You're supposed to have an answer when you raise your hand. I'm gonna say something that appears to be negative, but I don't want you to take it negatively because I want to do what we're trying to do, but I'm afraid that we're having a conversation about how to like, they just make the charter changes a little different. But unfortunately what we have on paper so far makes the charter change process even harder, I think, like making them have those public meetings and go before this commission and the bill and all that kind of stuff. And I wonder if there isn't just another way to look at it, which is to make the charter change process easier, which I think Gwen maybe mentioned or alluded to something like that. Like maybe we're taking it from the wrong point of view. We're sort of saying instead of charter changes, you can do this bill, what's in this bill. But what's in this bill is a lot like charter changes only sometimes worse. So maybe instead we should just look at a way to make charter changes more easy. I just a comment on charter changes. It's on topic, but it's also a little off topic, but which I'm not sure what I'm talking about anyway. What I find really interesting, because usually the charters are going to the Haskell box committee initially. And it's so interesting to me because it becomes this like, I feel like a lot of the conversation is about the process, right? The making sure that all the eyes are dotted and the T's are crossing the vote was conducted a certain way and the right paperwork went to the secretary of state and the right this and the right that. And it's like, it becomes, it's more and then if they don't do it the right way, how valid was the process? Because they didn't do it exactly as it's prescribed in charter and statute. And then once you get to the substance of the conversation, it's either, some of the, it skates by, because it's, there's not a lot of controversy. And then it's kind of the thing where you're like, God, that community spent a year with this charter and it was just such an easy fix when, and then they never get, again, going back to the, maybe it's, if it's good for the goose, good for the gander kind of argument where if it's that easy for a community, then it should be general law. But if it becomes more of a controversial issue, like the non-citizen voting provision, then they'll have more eyes on it. I don't know how you separate the two, but I agree that the charter process should be easier. But that's still, it's not the whole thing because you're not getting to the issue of having general applicability in law and flexibility in charter. I think, I don't know how Karen feels about this, but I think that if there is a way to, have the legislature look through that lens, like I said earlier about how, yes, it's a charter for the city of Barrie, but maybe it doesn't need to be a charter for the city. Maybe it could just be general law. We have- So, go ahead, Karen. You know, we have over the years proposed legislation that would make the charter change process easier. One of the, and I can dig up all those proposals, but one of them was that a charter change would be on the calendar for so many days and if fewer than at least 30 House members or six senators would have to ask for it to be taken into committee in order for that to happen and otherwise it would just go through. So there are those kinds of ideas that have been floating around out there. And for some of the more mundane issues, like increasing the size of your select board, nobody would ask for those to go into now. As soon as I say nobody, somebody will, but theoretically nobody would be bothered with that. So maybe it just, when Gwen was talking, it just, maybe we look at general law and just remove all those provisions. And I, Karen, and you can, stop me if I go too far, but I think that the way the S106 bill is written, again, we've had time over the last couple of years to put it down and look at it with fresh eyes. I don't, if it's gonna look like it, it does now with all those A through M or R or X or whatever letter we're up to for what we can't do, it is so, it's more work to comply with it than it's worth. So I would say, unless that's taken out, I don't see the value in moving forward with that as is. And Karen, you can fire me if you need to, but I'm just. Right, you're fired. I would definitely agree. And I think that actually the board agrees we had that conversation last year at some point at a board meeting and it's, it would be just a very, very heavy lift for a town to go through this entire process and maybe end up in the same place. So let's drop S106 and let's try and figure out how we can give towns what other things we can do that might give them more flexibility. And I will say that we probably won't come up with those before crossover, but we could have a, I would think a good discussion about some of the things where we might look at general law and just see if they make sense anymore and just wipe those out, Senator Clarkson. So I, if we're gonna do that, I would entertain actually hearing from some of our town managers. And I'd devote an hour to hearing from, several, many from different range of size towns. I mean, last year we heard from a couple and really get a sense from them where the barriers are, what are the most irritating sticking points for them? What would they like to see? What would be their ideal in looking at these possibilities and this opportunity? Because what we're really offering is an opportunity for flexibility, simplicity and more self-governance and some pilots for self-governance. Well, we wouldn't even have to do pilots. If we're looking at changing general law, it could just be for everybody who's out there. So I would suggest we maybe have a public hearing or just an extended committee conversation. Not a public hearing, okay, no public hearing. But it's like a range of them. Yes, no, I will pledge that we will spend an entire day at least after when we come back, looking at what we can do to make it easier for people and we'll get towns with big towns, towns with administrators, towns with town managers, towns without any, with just select boards and hear from a whole range of people. But no public hearing. I didn't mean, I meant just let's invite them in. And I can think of some very wise, experienced retired town managers too, like Frank Heald, you know, who, you know, just they're quite a few who've thought about these kinds of things and really have thought with that thoughtful contributions on this. Ben? And then Senator Polina. The House Government Operations Committee is taking up the Winooski Charter tomorrow and Tucker might wanna, you know, say something. But their charter has that provision that Karen had brought up about if they, if a town has a charter provision, they can borrow that charter provision. It's already been, you know, that's already been approved. So I think that'll be a really interesting conversation and they'll be a good barometer of figuring out where the committee is. And obviously there's the constitutional issues that Tucker had raised. So it'll be interesting to see if they try to accommodate that or if they just don't move forward with it at all. And so, yeah. So I think that'll kind of give us an idea of what our proposal of looking at through the lens of how this applies to everybody, right? How every charter proposal goes through, how warm they are to that idea. Because like we said, it's never your committee because your committee's at least willing to, you know, go a little crazy and let go of the reins a little bit, but not so much in the house. So. Senator Polina, you had a question. Yeah, actually two things. I would like to, I hadn't thought about this, but I would like to hear more about the constitutional issues involved in that charter change. What do I know? So if Tucker wanted to talk about that for a minute, that'd be good. But I also just have a sort of a question. When we talk about the fact that we're trying to give towns the ability to do things that are not in conflict with state law. I mean, I understand what that means, but do charter changes ever sort of challenge state law? The charter changes are, I mean. So it's kind of, it's like, I don't know, I don't know. It's just, this is very confusing, not a confusing conversation, but it's just, I'm going to quandary about what to do. Because it seems like what we want to do is have a commission. We have this commission in the bill. I know we're talking about moving away from the bill, but we have a commission in the bill that would just decide to exempt certain towns from state laws and go their own way. I don't know if that makes any sense, but the idea that charter changes represent a change or a challenge to state law by allowing towns to do something different seems to open a door to what we're talking about. But I could be totally wrong. I feel like I'm talking in circles. So I am going to make a suggestion then I'm going to have Tucker that we completely move away from S102. We not think about a commission or anything else and that list of things, that we have a devote a couple of days to hearing from different sized communities, differently administered managed communities and hear what are the things that bug them the most, the things that they think stand in the way of them being able to address local issues in a creative and flexible manner. And then, so I'm glad I didn't rewrite the findings because that would have been a waste, but anyway, and then we look at that, whatever they come up with the list. And then we look at general law that controls their inability to act creatively and flexibly. And that we look at just deleting those laws. If it's a law that says that they have to have three select board members and lots of towns are saying that gets in our way. Let's just take that off the books. We've done it with other things, but it's taken us four or five years to come up with them because we can't act quickly enough. So that's my suggestion for kind of a process of moving forward and everybody can disagree with me if they want, but I'll go to Tucker right now. So would you like me to talk about some of the charter proposals concerning municipalities being able to access other chartered powers? Yeah, I think that's what Anthony and Wyn wanted. So there's a potential spectrum of constitutionality here. So I'll start with the stuff that is likely unconstitutional on its face. And that's any formulation that would allow a charter amendment without action by the general assembly. Don't panic yet because we're talking specifically about special laws, special statutes that would need to be amended by the general assembly. Only the general assembly can amend those statutes, right? So if the formulation in the charter says that the municipality can amend its charter and statute without coming to the general assembly, unconstitutional. Now the concept of granting legislative authority to a municipality that allows them to access existing chartered powers for other municipalities may be constitutional. That may be a step that could be taken saying you, Wynuski, whoever may adopt an ordinance based on existing statute, which includes Title 24 appendix, the charters that are out there. That may be constitutional, but you're also presented with issues of special law in that case. So for example, if the charter provisions that are granted to the other municipalities say town of Brandon, you specifically may open the town of Brandon Electric Utility Company and provide municipal utility services to residents within your municipality. I think there would be some issues there with allowing another municipality to access those very specific special powers. And of course, the question is always going to be when you pass this general charter amendment for Wynuski or whoever, is it within the will and knowledge of the general assembly that you're taking into consideration all of this and you're overriding those special laws that are out there, are we going to have to not withstand certain provisions to make sure that the municipality has general access? I'm not sure. The next constitutional issue comes with granting that general access and then next biennium or next session, passing a charter amendment that is again, very specific to another municipality. So let's say you pass this general access for Wynuski and then the next session or let's go to next biennium because it's more clear next biennium, new assembly comes back, completely different legislature, unbound by previously passed statutes, comes back and says, okay, Tuckertown, you are allowed to do this. Now that Tuckertown statute is not only more specific, it is later enacted and it is later enacted by a general assembly that is completely reconstituted, has new authority and is unbound by statute. Then we get into a really interesting constitutional conundrum about whether or not that previously passed general provision in Wynuski's charter would allow them to access those future specific later enacted powers. However, that may not be your problem that may be the problem of the municipality that attempts to wield that authority and immediately gets a judicial challenge from an aggrieved citizen. Okay. Welcome back Senator Rum. I hope you had a good presentation. I think it did go well, thanks. And I want a town named after me too. I'm gonna start to pick one. Well, I'm very interested in having Tuckertown constituted around my property and then getting a charter that says that I can do whatever I want in contravention of state law. It'd be very beneficial for me. I don't want a town named after me. You'd have like a French village in that. It would be so cute. Oh yeah, right. Oh, oh, Jeanette, okay. It would be a Norwegian town. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so where are we here with this committee? I, Senator Rum, while you were gone, we heard from the league that they don't want us to pursue this bill this year because the way with all those restrictions in it, it's more work than it's worth. And it doesn't suit the purpose that we're trying to get to. So what we're thinking about is, and the other committee members have to weigh in because I'm the only one that's suggested this, is that we, well, I think this initial suggestion came from Senator Clarkson. That we take a couple of days when we come back and hear from towns of different sizes, different geographic locations, different management structures and listen to them about what there are the biggest impediments to them to be able to creatively and flexibly address their local needs. Then we start looking at what those are and trying to figure out how then to approach giving them that flexibility and creativity. Is that kind of what we talked about, committee? Yeah. So does that make sense to anybody to start looking at that that way instead of pursuing this bill that nobody wants anymore? Yes. Well, and it's a classic example of only a fool doesn't change their mind because the league was very supportive of 106 last year. I mean, and they've been thinking about it. I mean, I think we all were, and I think we're all supportive of giving municipalities more lead, letting them run a little more independently and flexibly and creatively and without such micromanagement. From us. Just to add, and again, not to be super negative, but when going back to that blighted properties, conversations I had and Tucker had brought it up last week of the week before whenever we had talked about this, but under the enumerated ordinance powers under 24 VSA 2291, which is sort of that laundry list of what towns can do under ordinance under their police powers, health safety, welfare. It's great to have these conversations and we'll obviously lean into it and have towns voice their specifics, but they'll have those proposals. Like Springfield will say, we wanna be able to address blighted properties in our downtown. And then you're still left with putting a provision that says a town shall have the ability to adopt an ordinance addressing blighted properties. And then you're still left with that conversation is do we really, the legislature saying, do we wanna be able to let go of that power and trust towns are not going to abuse their police powers to address blighted properties. Every legislative body, every legislature is different in a biennium. So we're hopeful, but part of us dropping the 106 is not because we don't believe in that pilot program because it worked phenomenally well in West Virginia, which is where we borrowed the idea from. But we understand that if this is the most favorable way of showing up in the legislature through the Senate, because we know we're gonna have the best results in the Senate, it's just gonna get worse in the house. It's not gonna get better. Normally we would be okay with working on it harder in the next chamber, but we just know that we're not gonna get that reception over there. Well, there are some people in the legislature, both in the Senate and in the house, I believe, who would probably even tighten the reins more. So we'll never convince 180 people because I firmly believe that there are among us in the 180, a number of people who really believe that we need to have that paternalistic oversight over our towns because we simply can't trust them. So, Yes, Senator Rom. Well, I'll just add I shared this proposal with my local government law professor who's been doing this for a long time. And he said, this seems so exciting except for all of these, you took out all the fun stuff. He showed so, that was his attitude too. He's always looking for interesting and creative ways to give local government more opportunity to experiment. And he saw the same thing that word. Who is that? His name is Gerald Frug. He's taught local government law at Harvard Law School since 1969. And Barack Obama's taken his class, Merle Weinberg has taken his class. He's, it's a really valuable class to take for anyone going through that school. I just visited and took the class. Well, didn't the Kennedy School have cross abilities to take courses at the law school? Well, right, I just don't, for the record, I have never admitted to Harvard Law School. No, but you were part of the Kennedy School and the Kennedy School enables you to take classes at the law school. Well, yeah, so let's get, when we have people coming and talking to us, let's get some people who are non-necessarily involved in governing a town. But some thinkers like that who are, you know, I was thinking of Frank Bryan, I don't know that he is, does this anymore at all. Susan Clark, I mean, there are people out there who've been thinking about this for a long time and who might have some suggestions and maybe we can become, like West Virginia was a model for us, maybe we can become a model for some of the other Dylan's states. Exactly, we could get Kasia's professor, we could get Kasia's professor and somebody from the law school. I don't know if we still have a local government expert, but I think we probably do. But you could ask your professor if he'd like to join us. Well, since you said it a few times, I feel compelled to say he refuses to testify to government bodies because he doesn't like to get involved in conversations like these. He likes to teach people like me to go back out and spread the word. That makes sense. So what do you say, committee? Should we go in this direction and see what we can come up with about better creative ways to approach this and maybe ways that will engender less resistance? Yes, sure. Or maybe engender more resistance, but are better anyway. Yeah, and I just have to be reminded about at some point about the resistance that the house that we face in the house because I just remember there was resistance but I can't remember why there was such resistance. Well, there were eight people in the Senate that voted against it. No, I remember that discussion. But then just sat on the wall in the house general and it didn't move and it didn't move for a reason. No, house govots, not general. I meant house govots. You know what I meant to say. So do you want to either Gwen or Karen, do you want to? Well, they actually never even held the conversation in the house government operations committee. They took up individual charter changes that they wanted to address and they never even had the conversation otherwise. So we don't have a really good fix on what the reluctance was in that committee. We've got lots of theories but we never actually got told. But remember, we're live. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We never actually got told what the problem was. Well, I would say that whatever we might come up with I think that the league needs to do some real bush beating and get people out there to contact their representatives and it is interesting to me because in the past when I first came into this legislature the feeling was that whatever a town clerk said the house members would do, it was just- I felt that just for one town in a county in the Southwest. No, that was the general feeling in this committee at the time and in a number of issues. And then somehow that changed and it seems now that there's less trust by house members of local government even than- And I always thought that house members were much closer to their local government and it would be more trusting and more- Well, a huge percent of them are former select board members. So I have to point out- Maybe that's why they don't trust select board members. No, I think that they used- I mean, I think that may not be the case anymore as we look at the composition of the house shifting a bit. Madam Chair, it's after four and- Oh, I'm sorry. And I think you and I have to be somewhere else. I have to be at a chair's meeting. Committee, if you want to keep on talking, you're welcome to do that. It'll be Senator Rom, Senator Polina, and Senator Colomore. Otherwise, we will see- Be careful. Senator White, on Friday at 2.30, this is on the agenda. So you might want to take it off because we're not going to be- You got it. Thank you.