 Good evening and welcome to Mount Perrier Civic Forum, where we review issues that are coming up on Town Meeting Day this year, which will be March 1st, and for many of you Town Meeting Day will be voting before returning your ballots in the mail. And tonight we're going to do one that's different, and that's the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority. And we have one candidate for the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority for one slot, and the candidate is Kim Cheney. Kim, welcome to the show. Thank you. Who is Kim Cheney? How long has Kim Cheney been in Mount Perrier? Oh, since 1967 I believe. Boy, it's a different Mount Perrier than it was then. It's been an interesting trip. How so? What was Mount Perrier in 1967, in terms of public safety? Well, in 1967 I was working on education in the education department, the first lawyer that they had. One of many now. Well, it's pretty extraordinary. They never had a lawyer before, and like most of the world it's gotten increasingly technical and more, I guess, more rules crop up to manage public business and it takes more lawyers to run it. And then I was state's attorney for four years. I was the first full-time state's attorney in Washington County. And then I was attorney general for two years. And private law practice from then until I said 80 is a good age to retire, but I hung on until about 82, I think. So when you were doing the attorney in Washington County, you had the chance to see more than Mount Perrier. And Washington County has more towns than Mount Perrier. Yes. Did you start to see Washington County more holistically in terms of public safety? I have a hard time with this word, holistic, but yes. Rather than a series of autonomous little cantons sitting next to each other? We're still autonomous little cantons with our own agendas, our ways, and they're very hard to breach, frankly. But I do think there was a pretty common ethic amongst law enforcement, police, what we're talking about. And I found, I would say, universal respect for the law and to be straight with people. And I found it to be, I hadn't worked with police before. I found it fascinating. I became less than very brave people doing incredible work. And it was a pleasure to work with them. And then I had my struggles, but they... What kind of struggles? Well, it was... You being your office, not you personally. Well, it's hard to separate those out. The state's attorney has authority to decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn't. Right. And I had a belief since vindicated that the war on drugs was a foolish thing to be doing. Now, what year are we talking about? Oh, 68, 69. During the heyday of the introduction of the New Vermont. And the war on drugs. Right. And there was a... I didn't think the way to keep people from taking drugs was to punish them and put them in jail, because all you did was magnify a bunch of people that had a beef with society, and they probably were going to make life worse. And if it was like alcohol, it wasn't going to work anyhow. And the collateral damage was their families. Yeah. And students getting stung with a criminal offense could affect their whole lives in ways that I thought was unfair. So we looked for different remedies and different ways of dealing with people. Were we ahead of other counties in Vermont at that point? This was a very personal feeling. And I don't think you can generalize. I think every state's attorney has to understand the people in his or her county and what they're likely to tolerate or not tolerate and what your own sense of ethics and right and wrong is. And it's a very individualistic performance in many ways. Were other counties taking that same tack? I mean, surely you kept track of your peers? Well, I don't know any specific statistics. Yeah, just your general impression. Yeah, I think there was a general sense that there's got to be a better way than trying to lock everybody up because we can't. We don't have the resources and the collateral damage is worse. So it was a time of social upheaval and the political climate was not very different than it is today. There was a right and a left and they were chewing on each other as they usually do. Would you have envisioned, in the current budget, the police are going to pick up an additional social worker in addition to the one that we share with Barry right now? Would you have envisioned that back then, that the police would have social workers in town? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it doesn't take very long to see that a lot of people who commit what are on the books of crimes have a lot going on in their lives that produce this. And it isn't people that set out to be bad people and go to jail. They have a background that leads them. Some people are truly malicious, I think, but that's not the general run of the mill. And some people are out to make illegal money, but they're very, I mean, it's a big population with a lot of different motivations. And I think any law enforcement system has to recognize that and try to treat them with some type of individuality. And I think social workers are helpful with that, particularly in the mental health field. For restorative justice, was that envisioned at all as a focus? It is now. Yeah, we began working on it a little bit, sure. When did the public safety authority start? I'm thinking about 2014. I've been on the authority, as you know, I'm a candidate for reelection. I'm a candidate for two three-year terms. And I'm a candidate for my final three-year term. And it was an idea that if you think about the world at all, you think in the off era, I can remember talking about regional cooperation was the beginning of the freedom of Vermont to move into the modern age. And as you started this conversation about different police agencies in the county, all in their own... Including the sheriff. Yeah. So public safety was originally the idea that we could consolidate police departments, just as you said, and bring them under some common management and budgetary, so we weren't duplicating them. That kind of morphed into communications. Communications in the sense of dispatch? Or in a less formal sense? Yes. I don't know, state's attorney, we used to have so-called Top Cobb meetings on a monthly or semi-offin basis. Talk about common problems. But now the Public Safety Authority morphed into how can we keep up a communication system, which is all the radio infrastructures throughout the county. And then dispatching. And it's very complicated. So its present dilemma is I think the noble idea of regional communication is cratering on the notion that every little town is going to go on their own. And the problem I see is there's a lot of money that's suddenly landing in the state. But it's mainly for broadband and not local radio communications. So there's very little public support for radio communications. And they're not cheap. We did an assessment of the communications in central Vermont, we meaning the Public Safety Authority. We hired a consultant to elevate. The bottom line is virtually all our radio communications, which is what fire and emergency services rely on, are obsolete and decaying and... Underinvested over the years. Yeah, they were built in the 90s mostly and their time has come. And the price tag for doing that is somewhere in the $8 million range. The state has a backbone for its highway patrol and for its sheriff's department. Is it possible to piggyback on that? There's a law enforcement side, police, which has state communications with the state police. And at least in Barrie and Montpelier and I think Northfield. I don't know all the other towns. But police radio communications are all pretty good by comparison. Fire and emergency services are the ones that serve the whole community and they're the ones that that's where the principal deficiencies are. Who is in the authority right now? What towns? Just Barrie and Montpelier. Berlin was initially contacted and never joined? The initial idea was that many towns would join. Barrie Town, for example, and Berlin. They both refused to join. And so that in a way crippled the regional idea because there were the two cities. Along the way, we invited, acronyms get a little hard to keep up, but there's a mutual response system for fire and EMS in the county. And their board selected a couple of people to work with the authority board. We were talking about dispatching radio communications. And I think that's not going to work. I think everybody wants to do their own thing. I'm going to speak out of turn because I know very little about this and what I know I hope is true. Our fire department has agreements with neighboring communities to provide emergency medical service. How do we communicate with them? Typically, if you pick a town. East Montpelier? That's a good solid town. You get sick. Typically, you get a cell phone if you have cell coverage or a landline. And you call 911. And you know what happens with that call? It goes to Williston. That's the state public safety answering thing closest to Washington County. So that call goes to Williston. Then the call taker in Williston looks on their charts or whatever that data they had and say, oh, if you need an ambulance, you call the Montpelier Dispatch Service because Montpelier dispatches for that town. And Montpelier will either call, typically first will call the volunteer fired EMS people in East Montpelier. And I expect if for some reason there's no way to get there, they might dispatch a Montpelier ambulance. One of the problems is very few of these towns, if you're the volunteer fire department person that picks you up in your town, you may or may not have radio communication with the hospital. And sometimes those messages are relayed through dispatch, but on the hospital, if you had a cardiac situation... If you had something that you needed to prepare for in the hospital, you'd like to know it in advance. So there's a whole overlay of difficulties with communications not just deteriorating equipment, but sometimes there never was any communication and new towers have to be built, new radios and so forth. So that was the mission of the authority to try to get a regional approach to this. And I think it's failing. I think the current leadership of the authority has given up on trying to have regional cooperation. They're opting to have the city of Montpelier try to run it all. And myself, I don't see how the towns are going to get the money to build the new radio system they want. This has to be a rural issue across America, where we're not unique in underinvesting in issues like this. Are there best practices that the authority has identified for cobbling together a system? There's no mystery about it. The mystery is people don't want to do it. They're used to their own little silo, their own chains of command, their own sense of importance, and they don't want to regionalize. And no place has provided an alternative kind of solution that's low techie or quirky techie that can get away from radio? No, radio is still the best public safety communication. It's what people are used to, and the properly constructed system will serve the most people. Cell phones are sporadic. They're subject to all kinds of interference, rivalries with different providers, and so forth. Could you explain to me what a radio would be like, how this would operate? I would start with the cell phone saying there's a problem over in my house in East Montpelier. Well, and then that call will go to Williston. Right, but under an ideal system, where would that call go? Well, one of the things we're talking about is to have a central dispatch system for the county located originally when you were talking with Tom Galanca. We were planning to have one regional dispatch center. For police and fire? For police, fire and emergency? Yeah, it would dispatch all three, but the police have different frequencies. They're not subject to the clutter that the other frequencies are. Our public safety frequencies, frequently the fire and EMS are frequently interrupted by taxi cabs in Quebec. And you're walked over by other broadcasters. There's a limit to the frequencies and fights with the US FAA and the Canadian equivalent so they don't overlap. But it's a very complicated structure. I assume that this is an issue all over Vermont. I mean, it is a state full of small towns proximate to one another. Yeah, I think it's not common to all rural areas, but most of them. And you're pushing on a really difficult problem. The problem, as I see it, is there needs to be some state funded support. That's exactly where I was heading. For local systems, and they need to be managed properly, and there needs to be planning so that if system A fails, system E can pick it up and the people are trained in both systems. And if you're in my opinion a dispatcher, you have to know which of our, I'm not sure the number, different towers that serve. You have to know which tower to send your message to. And some of those are more subject to interference than others. A new system would be a simulcast. All the systems would be broadcast so that everybody could hear it. And it would actually select, if you're in the ambulance in place A, it would select the tower to get your messages to and from. But as I said, I'm fearful. I don't see any state money, unless somehow we can get broadband and public safety money or facilities to work together. Is there a parallel authority anywhere else in the state working on their local version of what we're working on with Barry? Yeah, Chittenden County is. Are they having more success? Yes, in a sense. They divided up the rural dispatching as we have. And it's working. I don't know. I'm hoping to go on a visit over there early next week. Shelburne Police runs a dispatching service for 20 towns, I think. And Montpelier does the same thing here. But the whole funding apparatus. And Barry runs its own dispatching. They dispatch for the sheriff and they dispatch for a couple of towns outside of Barry and their own fire and police. And if anybody thought about how to organize this thing, they wouldn't do it that way. They would have a central management, both the economy and the efficiency. But again, when this thing started, that wasn't the mode at all. That was never envisioned. No, that's... In those days it would have been a question of autonomy. Being able to control your own police. Exactly. And those days are still here. You've been on the authority for six years. What are the victories that the authority has had in six years? The most significant achievement, well, first of all, I think it's been valuable to talk about all these things even if nothing was done. It's gotten people thinking more globally even if they can't quite pull it together to do it. Second, getting an assessment done of all the systems, getting it down on paper with knowledgeable people saying, this is broke, it's not going to work anymore. Instead of having one fire chief and pick East Montpelier say this isn't going to work for us much longer, you get a regional approach for the whole county and say we badly need to spend some money and training and build ourselves a more viable system. And we're on the verge of trying... We have the assessment. The issue is now identifying exactly what it would cost. There's estimates. I'm telling you roughly eight million. Eight million would do one county or would set up a model that other counties could then do at much less expense? No, no, no, no. That would be roughly the cost of the equipment. The towers and the wires and the radios to come up to contemporary speeds. Would there be an ancillary use for those towers besides this? Well, that's a good question. You're asking me essentially is for spending all this money on broadband and we're going to give it all to private cell phone people, why aren't those tower towers going to be public? Why aren't they publicly owned so the public can use them for different varieties of broadband? What would the public use them for? Or might the public use them for? You could use... It would help some public safety communications. For example, I mean it would depend on how good it was, but you could send, if you were to fire scene someplace, you could send video of an area and you could get back, if this was sophisticated, how the building is constructed, where the firemen need to go. Now, this is... That's a little advanced for our world. But those towers could carry some public safety communications, principally data and you're going to need some form of... A lot of people have cell phones and they'll get better even in the rural area if we build out all this broadband. And I think that could help with public safety communications. Is this city mouse, country mouse, where you have cities with a ton of suburbs around them that are probably not joined together? Are major cities able to whip this issue where we just don't have the density to do it? I can't speak globally about that. I think this is a problem everywhere. If you solve it on the state level, like the schools. Everybody used to pay for their own schools. Then we got used state aid, distributed assistance to the schools so everybody was on the same playing field. You need that kind of system to do public safety communications. Now, again, I'm speaking way out of turn about something I know nothing about. But if you have as many counties and some of these counties are a lot bigger than Washington County in terms of geography, in terms of square mileage, would that system be much more than eight million dollars because it's spread out over the whole state? Well, and much larger county in the northeast came to. Well, obviously the more people and the more rugged terrain you have, the more complicated your system is. Is it people or is it rugged terrain? Both. So you're talking about roughly a $100 million state investment in this. Oh, I'm not going to pull numbers out of a hat for you. I'll pull them on myself. The number of counties times eight million is approaching 100 million. Well, some counties are better prepared than others. I'm not even going to guess at that question. What is the next step that the authority has? Again, you're going to look at the system in Shelburne. What are you guys looking at for the next six-month horizon? Well, that's a good question. I think the current leadership is looking to peelier to resolve these problems. I don't think they'll be able to because what is needed is a funding system for the rural area. Looking to Montpelier, are you saying looking to the state house or looking to the city of Montpelier? The city. Who in the city of Montpelier would they be looking to? Would they be looking to Bill Fraser or city manager? Would they be looking to council? Would they be looking to Brian Pete or do what Bill Fraser wants him to do? Then ultimately it's the city manager they would be looking to. But aren't we sitting on this authority so that we don't have to look to Bill Fraser to solve it? I thought so, but as I say, I disagree with the current leadership of the authority. Let's move from fire and emergency to police coordination. What moves are we making? I know we have a social worker that we share with the Barry Police Department. Are there any other moves when the police departments are coming together? I'm not the person to really help you with that. I haven't worked with the police in many years. All I can tell you is the current environment for police is an extraordinarily difficult profession. It's hard to find people who would put up with the kind of environment that they have to work in with public— well, it's split like everything else. There's law and order people and people that want to defund the police. But the cop on the beat that's called to the scene, you don't know what you're going to find. Are you going to get shot by some idiot that doesn't like uniforms? And if you shoot back— It will be filmed at least, we're picking up bodycams so that episode will be— That may be some consolation to the survivors. Absolutely. But I'm talking about how hard police work is. And yes, I think building in a social context is very important. Because if you use force, you get force in return. And ultimately, force fails, as we all know. So you've got to learn your community, learn how to work with it, learn what the needs are. And see if you can solve what they need. Housing, schools, decent wage. That's going to solve a lot more crime problems than—that's where it all starts. It all goes together. We have in our budget again money for training of the police, for further training than they already have. I'm wondering whether the authority looked into having Barry— Well, we've been concentrating on fire and EMS. Because our member towns, Barry and Montpelier, have police departments. But the other people that use our dispatching service don't. So we've been focusing on, I think it fair to say, the more rural areas. Is the Sheriff's Department—I mean, they focus in, I think, on the more rural— or is it the state that places those more rural areas? Well, the state police, primary law enforcement, responsibility in areas where there's no local police department. Does the state coordinate with you, with that authority? Because this is Barry and Montpelier, it's only Barry and Montpelier. We haven't done a lot of work. The authority has not been concentrating on police. It's fire and emergency. Lately, yes. Have we purchased any communications equipment? Have either of the departments—I think when former city councilman Tom Galanco was on, we did pick up communications equipment in the police department. And we made sure that it meshed. Well, when you say pick up— I think we bought it years ago. Well, I don't know who we is. The city. Well, okay. And I think we did have a concern that it coordinate with Barry. Barry. The existing rural radio system was substantially funded by a earmark grant in the 1990s. And it hasn't had any capital kick since. And the two cities, when you say we, it comes out of your local property tax in those two cities. It isn't like there's some other funding source. The equipment's 30 years old. So it is. Can we still pick up parts for it? Some of them, but they're dwindling. How often does the authority meet? Well, they meet monthly and the authority has a lot of problems. It doesn't have any public safety people on the board, professionals. And we've asked to have the cities designate some, and they've refused. I think it's a conflict of interest. And there's some validity to that. If the Montpelier Police Chief is on the Public Safety Authority Board, which has the power, the authority has the power to put a ballot item to the voters and say, give us the money. It doesn't have to go through any city process. And here's the city trying to manage their own police budget. An authority trying to, as you point out, do we buy equipment? Well, it's coming out of our pocket. Can we buy it more economically? Maybe yes, probably yes, but not necessarily so, to have two cities bid together. Regional cooperation is in its infancy and it's not doing well. Is there an incremental process on this where we can start here, pick up this, incrementally improve it on the margins and build our way towards the towers? Obviously there are ways of doing that. It's hard to get enough people behind any plan to do it. Have you spoken to the delegation, to the Washington County House and Senate delegation? Not you. Has the authority spoken with them? I think there's been individual conversations. I know I've talked with some of our delegation. Frankly, it's complicated. They don't understand it. And they've got so many other things on their plate, it's hard to get them to understand it. And what they do understand is that it takes money. And everybody under that golden dome is trying to get money for their own project, so it's a very competitive environment. Are lives being lost as a result of this? Of course. And no one's listening? Well, I can't give you any statistics. One or two every now and then we have a glitch. And somebody's life could have been saved or a period of pain and danger could have been shortened? Has it reached a point where the radio is so fraught that people are calling from fire departments, a fire department and a cell phone? Well, no. I think at the moment, unless the taxicab people scramble our communications, it is working. It's pretty primitive and people are afraid that it isn't going to work much longer. But if you make that call from East Montpelier to Williston to Montpelier... It takes time. It takes time. It takes about a minute and a half. And that could be really important. A minute and a half could make a difference. Boy, on that note, that's a pretty grim note to close out. Thank you for your service. Now, this is going to be your final term. If you win, which you will win because you're the only candidate. Will this be your final term? Oh, I'd be term limited. I think the authority is in... I don't know if it'll continue. I decided to run again because I'd like to be part of trying to keep it alive. But I think there's forces at work that don't want to keep it alive. And I will leave that as a cliffhanger as to who those forces might be. Thank you for watching. This is Montpelier, Civic Forum. And Kim, thank you for coming and speaking with us. Okay, thank you. Particularly because you are the only candidate. And I'd urge everyone to get out and vote. And I'm not even talking about going on Town Meeting Day, which is March 1st. When you get your ballot, return it. Vote. Vote on every line. And watch these shows. And thank you so very much for watching.