 This is a joint meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Health and Welfare Committee and the Senate Economic, the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs. The subject of this meeting is public safety in Vermont. The three chairs of these committees have a few words to say. And I'm gonna start and then turn it over to Senator Williams. But one of the things we heard during the summer and fall of this year was the growth in crime rates in Vermont. The fact is, as we try to look and determine whether the growth in crime is real or it's not what it says it is, it depends on who statistics you use, et cetera. The problem is that we're seeing more violent crime. There's no question about that. The use of firearms in crimes. But there is an old saying in the corrections world that the best rehabilitation comes from having a good housing and a good job. And that's part of the reason for the Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs joining us. We also have a tremendous problem with opioid addiction. That's not a question, it's a fact. And that's the reason for the health and welfare joining of some of the other things. So as we deal with this problem during this legislative session, and I know it's a priority for the administration for the judiciary as well. So I'm gonna turn it over to Senator Lyons for a few words and then we'll start with witnesses after Senator Lyons and Robinsdale. Thank you, Senator Sears. So thanks everyone for being here. Committee on Health and Welfare is very concerned about the issues we're going to be hearing about today. Our committee has been trying to wrap our arms around housing needs, safety and community service needs for a number of years now and our arms are getting longer and longer. Because the issues keep growing and growing. The social determinants of health are very clear, housing, staying away from addiction, safety, all of those things build healthy communities, build strong population health as well as personal health. So today we have an opportunity to link all of these issues together and I'm looking forward to the testimony. I don't wanna talk any further but allow for Senator Robinsdale to make her comments and then look forward to hearing from our witnesses. Thank you. Thank you. I know my colleagues would join me in thanking first our staff and the chief of staff to the pro tem as well as the pro tem for allowing us to do something a bit unconventional. We were trying to remember the last time something like this happened, but it really does feel like all three committees need to break down silos and understand what we each can accomplish to ensure public safety in Vermont. I also wanna thank everybody who's come from near and far who's on the front lines of a lot of competing crises that are making up these public safety concerns that we're here to address today. We have a lot of people who are tireless and who are also trying to build systems or think about the whole system as they do their work. As the last chair to speak, I'm gonna do my best to say a few logistical pieces as well before we start. We have a long witness list. We originally had about 10 minutes. For folks, it might be more like eight minutes. In that time, if there's time for a question from the group of senators assembled here, the chair who introduces that witness will look around and see if there's time to get one question answered. I think that's all on the logistical piece for now. And I think it's incumbent upon us to understand an economic development, what judiciary sees and how they tackle issues and same for health and welfare. Our business community has told us that after the recession and Irene and the pandemic and the floods, this is one of the greatest turtles they're facing in terms of public safety in their downtowns to continue to operate. So we hear you all loud and clear and we will make sure we're all on the same page this session to move forward. Thank you, Senator. By the way, Senator Rob Binsdale was the originator of the idea of getting us all together. So you can blame me for your last effort. The first witness is by Zoom and it's the commissioner of the department of public safety, Jennifer Morrison. Good morning, Senator. Good morning, senators. Thank you for having the department of public safety with you today. My name is Jennifer Morrison. I am the commissioner. And present with you in person is one of my colleagues, Tupper Jones, who's our assistant general counsel. We're gonna take just a little bit of time recognizing the time limits that you all are under to talk about some wave tops related to public safety in Vermont. And we are definitely looking forward to more in-depth conversations as the session progresses. And please call on us anytime. So as to whether or not violent crime and crimes typically associated with the illicit drug trade whether or not that's up in Vermont, the answer is yes. And that is a fact. I will provide some data and then some comments about data. The council of state government reports that violent crime in Vermont overall rose by 56% between 2012 and 2022. In this decade, homicide rose 166% and rapes were up by 76%. Yes, Vermont statistics are still slightly below the national average, but I don't know about you. I don't take much of that statement. In 2017, Vermont had the lowest, I'm sorry, the second lowest property crime and the second lowest violent crime rates in the nation. By 2022, we have dropped to the 18th lowest for property crime and eighth for violent crime. Just in our region, our rate of violent crime is higher than states like New Jersey and Connecticut and Rhode Island. It doesn't take a statistician to conclude that things are going in the wrong direction. Between 2018 and 2022, shoplifting went up 45%. Homicides in Vermont were up 100% in that four-year period and sex or motor vehicles were up 108%. These are just a few categories from our own diverse data that's the national incident-based reporting system data. And the last data snig would all offer is that between 2019 and 2022, violent crime fell in 32 states across the United States, but not in Vermont. We were one of the 18 states that saw an increase. Things are going in the wrong direction in Vermont. So as I mentioned, my data is pulled from Vermont Criminal Justice Data Snapshot published in 2023 by the Council of State Governments. This booklet, it's pretty big booklet. I can make one available if you'd like it. And from our own Niber's Verified Data. Data is absolutely necessary to inform our discussions, but it is a one-dimensional representation of a very complex condition out in our communities. And candidly, it becomes a distraction sometimes and pulls the focus away from the real issue, which is harm to people and communities. In fact, I bet most of the Monters don't care about statistics. They care about what they see and experience when they walk or drive around their communities. And while I love to come and meet with you and I will whenever you ask, I'd strongly encourage you to talk to the EMS providers, the local police and the business owners in Brattleboro, Bennington, Middlebury, St. Johnsbury, Burlington, and well, any town in Vermont. As we approach the issue of public safety, we have to be willing to talk honestly about the difficult topics and we have to keep the focus where it should be, which is on people and communities. I'd like to offer up one difficult topic that we'll talk about in a minute. What we are doing is not working and we must do better. The approaches we have taken in the past five to 10 years are not working. Vermont is getting less safe, more Vermarkters are dying from drug use and our public spaces and downtowns are suffering. We've leaned in heavily to harm reduction strategies for 10 years now and harm reduction is a vital part of the solution. Do not misunderstand it is a vital part of the solution, but we still have record overdose deaths. It is clear that there's a piece of the puzzle missing and we ought to think about balancing prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and yes, enforcement in order to find the right path forward. I'll say a little bit more about enforcement in a minute, but what I want to clearly emphasize is that when I talk about enforcement, I'm talking about behaviors, usually criminal activity and I'm talking about behaviors regardless of why a person is exhibiting those behaviors. We cannot give people a pass on criminal behavior that threatens the safety of others and destabilizes communities and businesses. When we treat drug addiction as only a public health issue, we ignore the real harm being done in communities by those who are addicted to drugs and the dealers who bring with them a culture of violence and organized criminal activity. To be sure, addiction is a terrible disease, but it is also a unique disease in that it drags with it a lot of baggage. Addiction drags dealers and profiteers into our towns and cities. Addiction drags property crimes, such as retail theft and larcenies for motor vehicles with it. Addiction drags shootings and murders with it. It's here in every corner of the state. Vermont communities and Vermont families are paying a high price for this disease of addiction. Across the state, we're hearing from Vermonters, community leaders, law enforcement, landlords, service providers, business owners and everyday citizens. They are fed up, they are frustrated and afraid and they are confused by what is happening in their communities and they are asking and in some cases pleading for help. A common refrain we are hearing from all over the state is that there is a lack of accountability in the system. We are hearing from arrestees that Vermont has a reputation for being soft on crime and that our catch and release policies are well known in source cities across the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic region. We need to rebrand Vermont so that it is no longer known as open for business by drug dealers and others who operate for profit at the expense of Vermont's most vulnerable. We are hearing a lot about the harm done in communities by repeat offenders. Some familiar faces are racking up dozens of charges and continue to victimize others in the community with relative impunity. I could go on, but you have undoubtedly been hearing similar things from your constituents. We need legal tools to address non-compliant offenders and to quickly intervene and stop behavior that is harming our communities. I'll end by saying that law enforcement will continue to aggressively seek out and arrest those who prey on Vermont's most vulnerable for profit. These arrests must be accompanied by certain swift and fair consequences. And we have to be realistic that we cannot arrest our way out of a drug epidemic and the attendant violent crime that comes with it. In addition to investigations and arrests, we need coherent policies and strategies that will reduce the demand for illicit drugs. Reducing the demand for illicit drugs, not continuing to facilitate and normalize drug use is paramount. It may involve a re-examination of policies related to drug possession and low-level distribution. It will undoubtedly require consideration of a more balanced approach that includes more than just carrots. The path to reducing the demand for illicit drugs may have to include more stick. And those sticks might just save lives and Vermont's quality of life. So I'll turn things over to Tucker and I thank you. I'll be available until just before 10 o'clock if there are questions. Thank you very much. Can I ask a... I'm sorry. Senator, I'm sorry. I can't see, but just... It looked like she was reading her testimony. So I'm just wondering where the testimony is being posted under what you're saying. Well, would be helpful if all the witnesses, including Commissioner Morrison, if you have written testimony, if you provide it to the committee, we can put it on all three committees. All three, okay, that would be great. Thank you. Sure, I will. I have got a lot of chicken scrapped. I will clean it up and send a typed version over to Ben. It would be appreciated. Thank you, Commissioner. Our next witness is Tucker Jones from the Department of Public Safety, the Assistant Attorney General. Hey, hey, hey, he's my attorney, not the young person. He's her deputy. Well, I'm just reading the... Who are you? Let's get this straight before we start any further. Thank you. My name is Tucker Jones. I'm an attorney at the Department of Public Safety. You're not the attorney general. No, I'm an assistant general counsel there. There's no judge. All right, well, now that we know, thank you, Tucker, I appreciate it. And I misread your title. That's quite all right, Senator Sears. Good morning, senators. Yes, so you already heard my name is Tucker Jones. I am an attorney at the Department of Public Safety. I as well will have some written comments that I'll send in for posting on wherever you deem appropriate. The commissioner spoke about the crime trends the state has been experiencing. And I want to give you just one illustration of one of those trends. And the illustration is from last week on January 9th of 2024, business owner on Church Street in Burlington provided written testimony to the House Committee on Judiciary. And I just wanted to share some of the quotes from that testimony from the House committee. So these are the quotes, I'll just read the excerpts. In the past two years, we have seen a market increase in retail theft both in the frequency and extent of our losses. I spoke to city council multiple times making it clear that this business, our business was experiencing about $200,000 a year in known retail goods between organized and normal shoplifting. These figures have increased substantially in the last year. We spend at least $100,000 a year on our own loss prevention team and still experience these losses. Combined, we are losing an excess of $500,000 due to retail theft and the costs of trying to prevent it. This is not sustainable and calls our presence in downtown and as a business at all into question. The majority of our observed thefts are from repeat offenders. Something else I'll add is that a lot of these individuals have a certain level of entitlement because they rarely face consequences for their actions. To be sure, Burlington is still the queen city, but if we don't get retail theft and the associated behaviors under control, it will be a steady decline. And I have some copies of that as well, but we can ask for that to be posted. You know, that's from Burlington, but I've heard similar concerns as well from other communities as Commissioner Morrison pointed out. I live outside of Middlebury and I was struck by the degree to which the shop owners in Middlebury appeared to be pleading for help at the October 10th, 2023 Middlebury Select Board meeting. And to get a sense of the impact on those merchants in those communities, I do recommend that your committees consider Harry directly from them and others affected by these crime trends that the state has been experiencing. But of course, this is just one or two examples of the property crime and they don't include the impact of the drug-related violence and the overdose fatalities in our communities as well. One of the issues we are trying to solve this session with your colleagues in the Judiciary Committee is how to more effectively respond when people engage in criminal behavior are apprehended by law enforcement, arraigned for the offense in court, released with conditions of release and go on to engage in repeat criminal behavior, sometimes dozens of times, while under conditions of release without an effective intervention to stop that behavior until a case is adjudicated sometimes months or years later. Some significant harm to communities results from this scenario. Right now, there are limited tools available to quickly and effectively intervene and stop those patterns of behavior before a criminal adjudication occurs. So we're working to address this issue and consider what legal mechanisms exist to intervene faster and more effectively when that repeat criminal conduct occurs to apply greater legal pressure for behavioral change upfront. Some portion of this repeat criminal behavior stems in part from untreated substance use disorder. So the additional question arises of whether innovation in pretrial tools can be used as a faster and more effective and enforceable pipeline into treatment at the time of arraignment or thereabouts. The hope is that there is some common sense element to this from which policymakers could develop consensus. This particular issue of repeat offenders is part of a broader rethinking of how the state is responding to the so-called third wave of the opioid crisis, fentanyl. One model developed from the Stanford Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis projects that this decade twice as many people will die from an overdose in the United States than in the past two decades combined. If no new action is taken to address the epidemic. These deaths this decade are driven by fentanyl. As I recently informed some of your colleagues fentanyl is now pervasive in the illicit opioid market in Vermont found in 100% of the glassing bags tested by the Vermont forensic lab in 2022. You should also be aware that in 2023, 56% of heroin fentanyl cases also contained xylazine up from 12% in 2021. Interdiction efforts serve to disrupt this market but sometimes that disruption is only temporary and demand continues unabated. This is there is too much money to be made. The head of Vermont's narcotics investigation unit estimates that some traffickers can make $20,000 per week selling synthetic opioids in Vermont. As another commission report states the pull of demand continues to drive the supply of synthetic opioids. And synthetic opioids offer tactical and economic advantages that allow criminals to vastly outpace enforcement efforts. The result of this scenario is a rethinking about the most effective ways to reduce the demand for synthetic opioids. Especially when people with untreated substance use disorders encounter the criminal justice system. This topic falls squarely at the intersection of public health and public safety. We're discussing ways that the government for the government to more proactively ensure that people stop problematic drug use and obtain treatment when problematic drug use results in repeat criminal behavior. The example I gave above about more legal pressure and a faster and more effective and enforceable pipeline into treatment for repeat offenders at the time of arraignment is part of that conversation. This is of course a significant public policy issue. And it seems that a serious tri-branch consensus-building process is the best approach to tackle it. It is no doubt more complex and nuanced than the broad strokes I discussed today. But I know that I, Commissioner Morrison and everyone else we work with at the Vermont State Police and elsewhere are willing partners to collaborate on the solutions. And I thank you all for your time today and I'm happy to discuss these topics further this session. I appreciate your testimony and I think the committee's do as well Tucker. Can I ask you just a clarification? When you use the term repeat offenders, are we talking about people who are released in prison who committed new crime or are we talking about people who are out on conditions of release who continue to behave in a criminal manner and continue to rack up new crimes not necessarily violations of conditions but those are also part of it. Yeah, thank you for letting me clarify. I'm using that as shorthand to describe the scenario that I described in the beginning where people engage in the behavior they're arraying pre-trial and they continue to engage in the behavior pre-trial. So not repeat offenders in the traditional sense so that there's been an adjudication, some type of sentence imposed and then they go on to repeat later in life. That is its own distinct issue that needs to be addressed but I'm talking about the specific scenario of pre adjudication repeat offenses and our tools available to intervene and make sure that that doesn't occur. And it strikes me and I just clarification that there is nobody who supervises somebody who's on release from conditions. If you're released from prison after serving a sentence usually you have a period of time where you're supervised by parole or probation and if you're out on probation you're supervised but there is no one supervising you when you're out on release. And I'm unlike some other states like Massachusetts when the probation department responds to those unvoiced. And just tack on to that question. I mean, we have ourselves taken some of those tools away from the court as I recall, right? We've reduced the reasons people are able to be retained and capped to maybe of some concern to their community and may fit into this category. Yes, and one example of that is specifically in the context of those individuals who pose a risk of flight. In 2018 there were some bail reforms made and one of the reforms is a $200 cap on the expungible misdemeanors. And that is one of the topics that we are, that the Senate Judiciary Committee is exploring but we are also mindful that there are constitutional limitations on the withholding in position and revoking of bail. And so while it is important to explore whether some revisions to that 2018 reform are appropriate it won't necessarily address the class of cases in which individuals don't necessarily pose a risk of flight. Thank you, Senator DeLion. Yes briefly, I have been working with the tri-branch group through the Chief Justice's program. Yes, yeah, so with the... And I'm hoping that we'll hear more about and I'm very pleased that you brought it up. Yeah. Senator, sorry, yeah, I know it's awkward that I'm behind you. Thank you, Tucker, for your testimony. One issue that you mentioned but didn't go into much detail on was the increased crimes related to firearms. One thing that I'm hearing in my community is that the presence of firearms in situations, particularly that are involving social service workers, mental health workers, public housing workers, that firearms are just everywhere. Sitting on the coffee table when somebody comes to fix a faucet at a public housing place or on the public bus, people are bringing their firearms or into the town halls, people are bringing their firearms everywhere. And one thing I heard from some of our mental health workers in Addison County was that the police, including the state police, are telling mental health agencies that they are not going to respond to a situation because it's a mental health issue, not a law enforcement issue. And those include situations where firearms are present. So our mental health, frontline mental health workers are being put into this position where they're trying to do their jobs but they're in a dangerous situation because firearms are present. And the police, including the state police, are not coming to assist or taking it seriously that this is a gun issue, not a mental health issue, or it's both, it's a combination, but it's certainly an unsafe place for our mental health workers to be in. I've also heard reports that the extreme risk protection orders are not being followed up on. And including one case where someone actually fired at law enforcement, not state police, I believe, a sheriff, and was not charged. So I'm curious what you particularly, the state police are doing about what seems to be really problematic situations involving firearms and frankly, that are putting our mental health workers at risk. So two comments about in response to your question, Senator. First is, yes, firearms are a pervasive problem and firearms seized by the narcotics investigation unit increased 57% in 2023 compared to the year before. And one of the things that we hear is that firearms are being used to essentially purchase drugs and the firearms are going south and the drugs are coming north regionally. So there is an issue with firearms. Regarding specifically your question about these mental health calls, this is something that we heard as well earlier in the year and the Vermont Criminal Justice Council issued a memo to law enforcement to clarify the obligations and responsibilities of law enforcement as it relates to mental health calls and how the use of forest policy does or does not affect that. So that memo went out earlier in 2023 from the Vermont Criminal Justice Council to address that. I think, I don't know any particular, the particular cases that you're discussing, but I do know that there is a greater thought goes into planning now for when an in-person response may exacerbate an individual's mental health condition when they only pose a risk of harm to themselves. And so I think law enforcement is being more mindful about the planning process. And one of the countervailing interests at stake is to not exacerbate by responding in person when they're in the middle of a crisis. So, but that is a balancing act. And there was a significant effort that went in in 2023 to address that through this memo with the Vermont Criminal Justice Council. I totally hear you, I agree it's a balancing act, but it seems to me that the communication between the state police and our mental health agencies is not, has not been adequate about how the state police are balancing it and making sure that they are actually responding and not telling mental health workers you guys have to deal with this. And when, especially when there are firearms present. So I think the communication needs to be improved, especially from the side of the state police. Thank you. And I wanna say thank Senator Hardy for bringing this issue up. We do have a bill in our committee that will begin to look at this issue. Having critical protocols for public safety and emergency service personnel as well as mental health counselors when they're approaching a difficult situation is important to consider. And we will be looking at that bill. Do you wanna make a comment as a chair of a committee here that I think it's important that we move through the witnesses. There are a lot of good, there's so many good discussion points that we're going to hear that we could be here all day. We would like to do that, but we won't have it. Thank you, Senator. And thank you all. We'll see you tomorrow. Eddie Barber is the Director of Violence Prevention Task Force signed to the Governor's Cabinet. He is here, thank you. By the way, just while she's getting ready, people have questions about community violence and so forth. I've found D to be extremely responsive that you send her an email about whatever individual problem you're looking at. Thank you, Senator. Good morning, Senators. And thank you for inviting me here today. As Senator Sears mentioned, my name is Dee Barbic and I'm the Director of the Violence Prevention Task Force. Just for background, the Violence Prevention Task Force was established in August of 2022 as part of Governor Scott's 10 point public safety plan. The task force is comprised of senior executive branch level members, including the Secretaries of the Agency of Education, Digital Services and Human Services, and the commissioners of the Departments of Health, Public Safety, Corrections, Children and Families, as well as the Chief of the Criminal Division of the Office of the Attorney General and the Executive Director of the Office of States Attorneys and Sheriff's. The task force works to identify best practices and innovative approaches for effective and sustainable community violence prevention. Additionally, the task force looks for areas where changes and improvements can be made to prevent violent crimes and whole defenders accountable, which includes identifying gaps in policy and working to close those gaps. This includes working collaboratively among agencies to address public safety, which also includes school safety. What we are hearing from our communities is a lack of accountability for offenders which has been referred to as catch and release. Some call it a revolving door. This creates a lack of deterrence for criminal behavior and a disregard for safety of our communities. As the commissioner said in her testimony and Tucker in his, we have seen an increase in the rates of property crimes and violent crimes in the state of Vermont. Along with that, I believe the state's attorneys may present information on an increase in criminal activity by repeat offenders. Property crime rates to include larceny of motor vehicle theft, larceny and motor vehicle theft have been trending up in Vermont over the last several years, while the rest of the country has been trending down. In some instances, when comparing Vermont crime rates to the national average, we may be lower, but when looking at trends over the last several years, Vermont is trending up. As the governor noted in his state of the state address, according to the council of state governments in 2017, Vermont had the second lowest property and violent crime rates in the nation. In 2022, we dropped to 18th and eighth. These are not just numbers. These are things that our communities are experiencing and feeling firsthand. We have not been holding repeat offenders accountable and are seeing multiple violations of conditions of release and failures to appear for court hearings. And the individuals continue to remain in the community and continue to commit crimes. We have an obligation to keep our community safe and we are not meeting that obligation. Our retail businesses are seeing increases in theft and with that more violent behavior as well. We have heard from retail business owners that they're experiencing thefts that are clearly organized business enterprises and the individuals committing these crimes know that there will be no accountability for their actions. There needs to be a balance and in how we address criminal behavior. This is not solvable by one strategy or one single solution, but as many pieces of a complex problem and requires a combined effort that includes policies that address the demand for illicit drugs and holding drug dealers accountable through swift and appropriate consequences. What we have in place at this time is not working to deter criminal activity and accountability for actions. We need to implement additional tools that will do this. An example of just a few areas that can address some of what we are experiencing include addressing individuals who repeatedly violate their conditions of release. This cannot continue to be a revolving process of paperwork. We need to ensure that cases are being adjudicated in a timely manner and we need to ensure that appropriate sanctions are imposed at the time of arraignment, which is in step and aligns with accountability. Current laws can be modified so that violations of conditions of release is no longer another misdemeanor crime in which a citation is issued to appear for yet another court date weeks or months away, but instead provide courts with the tools they need to hold individuals who repeatedly fail to comply with court orders. We are also supportive of efforts to roll back some of the 2018 bail reforms that have capped bail at $200 and made it practically impossible to hold individuals for failing to appear for court. We would also oppose further efforts to eliminate cash bail. Work can be done to modernize our drug crimes as Tucker Jones testified a few minutes ago, the prevalence of fentanyl in the drug supply in Vermont is like we have never seen it before. We are also seeing an increase in xylazine for which we know that naloxone is less effective. Xylazine also has debilitating physical side effects. Drug traffickers are preying on our most vulnerable populations, improving our drug laws related to trafficking and dispensing with death resulting, such as exist in S58, which is in Senate Judiciary, is a means to address these issues. Finally, we'd like to see movement on a system of universal sealing versus expungements with access to criminal records for criminal justice purposes. It's difficult to have confidence in our data on crime when we erased over 20,000 criminal records last year. We are hearing the frustration and the fear from our communities. Changing this will require addressing these issues using a variety of tools that include not just incentives or carrots, but also incorporates measures that will hold offenders accountable. Thank you. Thank you. Any comments? Please, thank you very much. Thank you, Senator. Our next witnesses, and I don't know if they're coming together or something. Speaking of statistics, we actually have the people who do the statistics to crime research group, Dr. Robin Joy and Monica Weber. Thank you for being with us this morning. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us. Appreciate it being here. And let's introduce ourselves. I'm Monica Weber. I'm the executive director of the crime research group. And I'm Dr. Robin Joy. I'm the director of research for crime research. Are the previous speakers correct or are they wrong? Well, we have lots of data to go through with you, so hopefully we can answer that question. But before I move into the data, I just, if you wouldn't mind, some of you aren't aware that we are a crime research group, so I just want to give you a brief introduction as to who we are. We are a non-partisan independent, nonprofit research organization that's based in Vermont. Our mission is to provide research to policy makers, public and private sector clients, and the community to encourage evidence-reformed practices to promote a fair and effective justice system. In addition, we also have a contract with the Department of Public Safety and we all provide services to the state as a statistical analysis center often abbreviated to SAC, if you ever heard the term SAC. And the SAC's main goals are to collect, analyze, and report statistics on crime and justice to federal, state, and local governments and to share state-level information nationally. So we prepared a lot of reports for you today based on the questions we received. And these reports do draw on a number of data sets so we'll be very specific when we're going through them about the data sets that we're using. And we may talk to you about the benefits and drawbacks of each of those as we go through them. I did send all of these reports to the committee assistants and they should be on your website so you should be able to see them. They are lengthy and detailed and so we're not gonna have time to go through all of them but we're always willing to come back and provide you more information or answer more questions. So we're just gonna start with the first one which is, if you're following along, retail theft using Niber's data. So again, there's lots of acronyms here. So Niber's, I think you've heard previous witnesses talk about Niber's, the National Incidentation Reporting System. This is a database maintained by the FBI and the data is submitted to the FBI through a lot of information that's collected by law enforcement and audited by the Department of Public Safety, more or less. So we looked at data from 2018 to 2022, just a note about the timing of Niber's. So 2023 has ended. Niber's is highly audited and so we won't get 2023 data until maybe August or September of this year. So that's why we're stopping in 2022. So based on that information, what we can see and you've heard some testimony this morning already, retail theft has increased post COVID, right? So in 2019, there were 2,022 incidents of retail theft and in 2022, there were 2,416 incidents of retail theft. I don't know if we wanna go into definitions of between incidents and offenses, but an incident could actually contain more offenses. Correct. Then, so it's a group of offenses. However, only 2.66% of those retail theft offenses have other offenses associated with them, which means people are generally going in and having one sort of retail theft offense when they are committing that crime. The Niber's data, just the way they're organized, don't indicate any evidence of organized crime or gang activity in these retail thefts. And I would point out, and we say more about that in our report that scholars really have struggled to answer the questions about organized crime with the data that's available right now. So I'm just gonna say that from a data perspective, we can't say whether or not it's related to retail theft. The other thing about retail theft is that the clearance rates, which is basically the resolution rate by arrest for retail theft has decreased. So it was 50% in 2019 and it's 35% in 2022. Just clarify that means that all the retail thefts, only 35% of the people are caught. Correct, correct. Thank you, thank you. That is correct. And on top of that. The likelihood of getting caught is three and a half to 10. So no wonder it's up. Right. And related to that. Senator Foskey has a question. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm just wondering about the Niber's data starting in 2018 and if it goes out beyond that, because this is a really narrow window to look at with a pretty significant impact of COVID. So I'm just wondering if, like I understand we don't have 2023 data, but is there data before 2018? Yes, it's complicated though. And it's complicated for a few reasons. So part of it, you're getting this because this is what House Judiciary asked for first. So that's part of it, that this was the timeframe that they wanted to look at. I can go back farther. However, when some of the larger agencies switched to Valkor like Burlington, South Burlington, et cetera, there was a problem submitting to Niber's during those years. So if you go on the CDE's website, for example, and you look for Burlington crime in 2015, you will find that Burlington had no crime. So there is a data quality issue for some of that period of time. So we try not to use it. We have other sources where we can try to build that back, but I'm generally not comfortable saying this is how it was. Understandable. And have we resolved that data quality? Yes, yes. So the data, yes, yes, yes. The data problem has absolutely gotten much better. Yes. It was an issue with Valkor that was resolved a long time ago, but unfortunately the FBI doesn't take resubmissions. They stopped their data collection nationally at a certain point of time. We do have a rebuilt data set, but again, it's not one that I'm really comfortable coming in and saying this is how it was. Okay. So the last point I wanted to make related to this particular report using Niver's data, following up on this point that 35% of the people are arrested. 70% of that 35 are arrested within one week of the offense. So when they are arrested, they're arrested within one week. So that's reached out to us using Niver's data. The other data set that we use on a regular basis is the judiciary's data set. We receive regular data extracts and filings and dispositions from the judiciary. So we did an analysis using that information and also noted that the 2023 retail theft charge filings, they're consistent with pre-COVID years. However, there is an increase in the number of felony retail theft charges that are filed. So that's where you would see a difference in the years. And most of the felony retail theft charges are also disposed of the felony. I think there was a question that was raised at one point is are people overcharging in order to maybe get a plea agreement at a misdemeanor? But in this report, you'll see that most felonies are actually disposed of as a felony. We also did an analysis that could potentially address sort of backlog related issues. And we see that backlogs can occur at all phases of the process. So there is a graph in here and I'll just use Adson County as an example. I might have to go to it just to remind myself. These are figure three and four in our report. So you can see here that it takes on average Adson County about 200 days to dispose of an offense by the time from the offense date. So offense to disposition date, 200 days. However, it's shorter from arraignment to disposition. So that once person's arraigned, that time to disposition is much shorter, which indicates to us that there is some gap in between the time the offense is committed and in this case, the arraignment date. So there could be some sort of backlog or delay that's happening there in the community. And so as we're looking at sort of how to make cases go through the system factor, it's just an example of looking broadly and not necessarily only at maybe what's happening within the judiciary itself. So again, so the question of repeat offenders, we did find that 57.6 of repeat retail theft offenders are charged with a new retail theft offense within 30 days of their first arrest. Not charged. Arrested. Arrested, pardon me. They're arrested within 30 days. Of that small minority that are actually arrested. Yeah. At least some odd percent come back and do it again. No, so we have a small amount that are arrested then that a part gets narrower because fewer people are charged, right? There's a very robust diversion program in Chittenden County, for example, for retail theft. So some people are being diverted. Once people, what we looked at is, so for those people that had during this five-year period more than one retail theft offense, so we were looking at those folks. So those repeat offenders and there were, we have the exact number for you in there. There were 303. There were 303 repeat offenders during those five-year period. And those people who reoffended were more likely to reoffend within like the first seven days. So we've heard some testimony from folks about it's the same people perhaps that are causing a lot of the crime. There is evidence that that is true in the data when we look at the offense date. So, you know, they committed an offense. They maybe haven't been arrested yet. They're committing another offense within those seven days. And, yes, yeah. Mr. Chair, I think my committee can attest I'm kind of Chief Bellringer when we meet and we have 16 more witnesses. So I just wonder if you can go to concluding takeaways and maybe get to one question. I just really worry that if we're gonna try to end relatively on time, we need to respect other people's commitment. Well, I'll let other, we did have one other report on drug files and filing. So, and I will say this quickly, Senator, I think one of the things I want to raise your attention on this drug filings and dispositions using court data is that some of the work that you may have done in the past regarding opiates appears to be working because there are less charges being filed for heroin use in the criminal courts than there were. That's going down. But what is going up is cocaine. And so I just want to put that on people's kind of radar that when I look, what you'll see in this chart is also looking at what other charges are associated with drug charges by drug. It's not property crime by and large. It's public order. That's your trespass, your violations of constituents of release, your disorderly conducts. What is rising, but maybe because you changed the law is the charges of weapons associated with drug charges. You did make a lot of changes in the laws regarding felons and possession, et cetera, that may be doing that, but we can look into that. I think what is important though is trying to get at why are cocaine charges rising. The most common charge associated with fentanyl was not heroin, it was cocaine. And so is it something that you did that is diverting folks that you're really, that is what's your intention and this is who's left? Why is this who's left? Is there a racial equity issue and there may be? And so that would be the highlight as you're talking about opium. We're not discounting that opioids are a problem. In the court data, it's cocaine. One question. So you're telling us that we're not really gonna get the data for this time period right now until August, something like that. Depends on which, not necessarily for the crime data, there are other sources. We can get judiciary data on a monthly basis. I just have not updated it quickly. There's nothing. Yeah. So with that you're quoting right now from the other sources? The cocaine data, that's from the judiciary sources. Yes, those has to do with filings and dispositions. Yeah. Thank you. Very quick question. Thank you very much for your report today. I appreciate it. I understand you're a non-profit, non-partisan organization. Do you have a large contract with the Department of Public Safety which some might construe as a bit of a conflict of interest? Do you have any other large contracts that you can tell us about? We have just finished up. I mean, we've had a variety of contracts over the years and I've been with the organization one year so I might rely on Robin's memory a little bit more but we've had, we just finished a large contract with the Lund Center from during an evaluation. We have a contract with the National Institute of Justice to look at people of color who have experienced the criminal justice system in Southern Vermont. We get annual funding from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to continue to do research and all of our code is available if somebody wants to recreate my research as part of being transparent and being a researcher. Absolutely, we share everything that we do and you can judge. Yep. Thank you. So our next witness is Polly Major from Vermont Housing and Conservation Board as she's getting up here. I'll just say for anyone listening and waiting for their turn to speak or in the audience, please try and get a note to Ben if you could chat or to our other committee assistants if you need to go around in case you have a time commitment and need to let us know. I'd also love for one of our committee assistants to kind of give a wave when it's been five minutes because we can sort of signal, let's try to get to key takeaways and get to at least one question. Thank you so much, Polly. As we turn more to the housing world, I think it's fair to say that we try to bring units of housing online so people have access. Senate or Lions Committee tries to make sure people retain their housing and are safe in their housing and we're running into a lot of issues making sure that everyone feels safe and there's accountability if someone is really creating a dangerous environment for other tenants. Well, thank you senators for having me in today. For the record, my name is Polly Major. I'm the director of policy and special projects for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And as a little background, the HCB supports the vitality of Vermont's communities, their investments in both affordable housing and in land conservation. And our housing work includes a range of permanently affordable housing from shelters to affordable rental housing to manufactured home communities to launching families into home ownership. And as the chairs discussed at the onset of this meeting, having stable housing really is a root cause of stability for families, for individuals, and for communities. And the affordable housing development community has been working hard over the decades, but especially in the last three years to bring much needed housing and affordable housing to this state. Since 2020, because of your investments in affordable housing, they're helping to create 1600 new units that are gonna be available to Vermonters and they have projects in their pipeline that they would like to take on in the coming years to keep on adding to that much needed supply. You've invited us in today to talk about how public safety impacts housing and the tenants that make up these vital communities. What we have observed from the diverse housing settings in which we work is that public safety concerns in the broader community mirror those that are felt and experienced within affordable housing. As a colleague of mine ran into a old friend of hers that lives in Taylor Street Apartments, the affordable housing that's right over the Montpelier Transit Center. And when she was checking up on her friend, her friend said, you know, I love my new apartment, but I don't feel safe there because of the drug activity on the bike path outside. And that's just one example of how the community experience is impacting the affordable housing experience. And our partners own and operate homes that are integrated into the broader community and impacted by those trends. Vermonters who depend on affordable housing sometimes are vulnerable and may have few opportunities to move if they experience the adverse impacts of public safety challenges in the community. They are also our neighbors and our friends. They work in our hospitals, they serve our lunches at schools or at the restaurants in our communities. They are Vermonters and they also experience the impacts of public safety that are concerned to us all. Last week, a group of affordable housing providers gathered for a discussion on property management and safety. One executive director shared a story that I'd like to share with you today. And I want to emphasize that both of the tenants in this story are victims. She talked about how a low income single mother with two children lived in one of the buildings within her portfolio. This mother felt safe in that environment and she felt comfortable with her kids coming home off the bus when she wasn't there. That was until a new tenant who was struggling with substance use disorder moved into the building. Because of her addiction, her drug dealer and others took advantage of her and forcefully used her apartment as a base. This brought a number of people into the building who were engaged in unsafe behavior. The mother and her children experienced the impact of this unsafe situation, but her limited income prevents her from changing her living situation. At the same time, the new tenant is also victimized because her substance use disorder made her vulnerable to this abuse. Housers are looking for better tools to manage situations like this. They want better outcomes for all their tenants. For the tenants struggling with substance use, they need to be able to connect their tenants to treatment. For the public safety of the mother, her children and the whole building, they also need to be able to keep people out of the building who are causing issues, but who might not be on a lease. Eviction can only apply to the person who is on the lease. And so their working, Housers are working to build closer relationships with public safety and with social services and the treatment communities to better serve their tenants but capacity constraints in all of these sectors are a major challenge. Having tools to remedy situations like this is especially important as affordable housing communities work to provide housing for Vermonters experiencing homelessness. Households experiencing homelessness experience trauma. And housing providers must provide safe environments in order to not retraumatize these households and increase their chances of success once they've obtained housing. This means that affordable housing providers need to be able to connect tenants with mental health supports, substance misuse treatment and when necessary need to be able to connect with public safety interventions. Housing, one more minute. Thank you. Housing providers work to improve the safety not just of their buildings but of the communities in which they operate. I want to end by highlighting three ways that Vermont's affordable housing community can be part of this solution. First, the housing community understands that we must invest in solutions that impact the root causes of our public safety concerns. Housing developers have partnered with the recovery community and have worked to bring on four new recovery residences around the state and continue to look for opportunities to expand recovery beds. Second, housing providers recognizing that improving public safety is tied to improving community health and they are making investments in resident services although they will be the first to acknowledge that more must be done in this area. And finally, affordable housing development is a tool for reinvestment in our communities. I talked to the onset about the work they're doing to bring on new units but they also work hard to push back on the dangerous and harmful perception that affordable housing is linked somehow to crime. This perception is especially harmful to tenants but it also feeds into the nimbyism that makes it hard to build in our communities across the state. Community planning and investment can be an incredibly powerful tool in creating safe and resilient environments. And if we can work together to create places in our downtowns and the heart of our community centers that are welcoming, that are economically integrated and that are loved, we can help to create places that are safer for all who live there. Thank you, Molly. One question? Yeah, thank you. So I'm wondering how much of the affordable housing that you're developing is scatter-site or mixed income versus project-based? So the bulk of the work, the majority of the work is parental housing development and we have a lot of concern about costs. And so the most economic way to do that is to do it in a larger multifamily building. However, we know to serve diverse communities across the state, we need a range of housing options and that's why we have scattered site home ownership options, we work in mobile home parks. And we do do scattered site rental development as well, especially in our rural areas. Rural Edge in the Northeast Kingdom has a lot of development models like that. And the larger multifamily units, are those mixed income or exclusively affordable lower income housing? Mixed income is the best outcome for all tenants. So that's what we aim for. The DHCB's funding specifically goes towards units that are affordable under 100% AMI and there's different targets and we're asked to meet different targets of very low income versus moderate income. But when possible, we seek to invest in mixed income communities because that's best for all tenants and for the communities at large. Wonderful. Do you have data on kind of the percentage of those different developments anywhere that I could look at? I can get you something. Awesome, thank you. Thanks so much, Colleen. Thanks for everything DHCB has done. I don't know if this be hearing. The next witness is Gary Marble, the field operations manager of the Department of Corrections. I think this is connected to housing. Okay, yeah. Well. In transition. Transition, okay. What do we talk? Gary Marble, field operations manager for the Department of Corrections. I'm here to speak today about anything that the committees are interested in discussing, but I understand that there was interest in discussing violations of conditions of release and home detention, which is what I was here to discuss a little bit today. As I was already been discussed, we don't currently have any authority over conditions of release through the Department of Corrections. As you pointed out Senator Sears, that typically is a more law enforcement role in other states, such as Massachusetts Department of Corvation, I believe, I think you mentioned. And home detention, we currently have eight people on home detention. We had 12 and then expanded our criteria to include a referral to the court for all non-listed, non-violent individuals who do not have a hold and who have a residence in Vermont. And we also tried to expand it by having it be passive monitoring, which allowed us to potentially open the doors to have the resources deployed to more people if we ended up having a large swell of people coming from the court. And we found that the numbers haven't increased yet. We're still at eight. So I'm happy to answer any questions you have about that. Senator Caution. I'm very interested in your transition housing because I'd love to know how many transitional beds we have at the moment, how supported are they? I certainly know about Dismas House. So I mean, I'm clear on that, but what additional transitional beds because it strikes me they're a critical component to the success of the lease. Yeah, I know we've expanded our transitional housing. I don't have the exact numbers on the beds that we have available right now. My colleague, Derrick Meadovnik, would be the one to speak to you about that. I know that we've expanded our transitional housing to include less congregate housing and more individual unit housing so that we could house more people and have fewer returns from transitional housing. So it's critically important. We have a more robust transitional housing system with supports for everything and workforce development help and the whole range. Would you be kind enough to get that to us and or we'll have Derrick come and testify? Sure, I can speak to one of the challenges that I'm aware of with expanding transitional housing is that because of the lack of available units in the community, when we look to expand transitional housing, we're competing with other departments and other entities that provide housing because there's no additional units being built at the rate that's needed. So I know that that is a kind of a push pull that we have to contend with that as we expand the number of people on supervision that could get housing, we're potentially decreasing the number of units that are available to people that are not on supervision. Right, but housing community, we could look at that and we have certainly made space for people exiting homelessness. We can certainly at work on making space for people transitioning out of the alumni from corrections. I can clarify that the House Corrections and Institutions Committee is working on the home detention issue and how it could be more widely used. So we're waiting for them to take some action on that issue. Senator. Thank you, Senator Sears. One question I think I hope you know the answer to and that's around the fact, the forensic, I actually can't remember everything that the sense stands for, but how fully are you utilizing that program in transitioning people out of corrections? Yeah, so that's the forensic assertive treatment. Yeah, that's a pilot project in Burlington, Vermont. That's been fully utilized in terms of our staff. We want to keep a little bit of flexibility so that the maximum number of individuals is for a probation officer assigned in that case load is 20, I believe we're keeping it up. The challenge that we've run into, which is a broader challenge with all the service providers in the state is maintaining employment for the people that are providing the service for the faculty pathways. So I believe they are fully staffed or close to fully staffed right now. And we're collecting data on that in terms of outcomes, but it's a small, it's a small pilot. So you need longitudinal data really to see if it has efficacy. You're also contending with that it's a population historically that returns to incarceration more regularly, which is the whole point behind the project really is to try things that we haven't tried before. So you're gonna see a lot of returns among that group. The hope is that you reduce the number of returns statistically speaking. And then my other question, you may not know the answer to, but that is around how many people are actually still incarcerated because there is no housing. So like I'd be one population, you'd say. Maybe. I'm not familiar with the inside terminology. Yeah, so right. I mean, I don't believe, I don't wanna give you the wrong number. I wanna say it's under 50. But I know our incarcerated population is currently at 1334 and we have 482 detained. Sorry, how many? 482 detained currently. 82. 482 were currently detained. So there's less than 1,000 people actually sentenced. That's about it. In 50 waiting for us. So our next witness. Yeah, I think it's up to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have a question behind this. Go ahead. No, we don't. Thank you, Gary. Appreciate the testimony for your help. Our next witness is Steve Murray, Executive Director of the Harlem Housing Authority. And I will say as he's walking up, he's been sounding the alarm for quite a while to his delegation that the situation is changing in the house like that. Just to reiterate what Gary said, we have a DOC grant and with partnership with Shipplane Housing Trust and ourselves, we house previously incarcerated people. Through that grant, we had zero recidivism for the last two fiscal years. I can't promise that this year because the stressors are higher, but we're roughly housing about 30 previously incarcerated people through the program with zero recidivism. So it works. We do firmly believe that if you don't provide housing to someone who has done their time to society, they're just gonna go back to crime. You have no other choice, but I'm gonna use this time for that comment. Y'all, I'm not a politician and I've been accused a lot of using hyperbole, but in this situation, y'all don't see what we see. And I just, I'm gonna speak from my heart. I'm not gonna go ahead and throw out a bunch of numbers. I'm just gonna tell you what we are seeing, what our residents are living through and what our staff is living through and our contractors. You know, our mission is to provide low income vulnerable members, our community access to safe affordable housing with retention services. We actually have about nine counselors and retention workers whose sole job is to keep people housed in the greater Burlington area. A year ago, there was a big to do about Decker Towers. WCAX came and spoke with the residents of Decker Towers. My response at that time a year ago was Burlington doesn't have a Decker Tower problem. Burlington has an opiate problem. We're not, we're looking at one building and we're saying the problem's here. I got beat up so badly for that comment, but a year later, I feel a bit vindicated because it's not just Decker Towers. It's every apartment building in Burlington to the point where even high end condo associations are trying to hire police officers which they can't do anymore. Everyone is struggling. So when, what we're seeing is a situation where we'll use Decker Tower because it's easy. It's in the news, but any of our properties will get people in. Your income is maybe $1,200 a month in Social Security and some guy from Springfield or Pennsylvania or New York comes along and offers you either product or money to deal out of your apartment. And when you're making $1,200 in Social Security and a third of that goes to pay your rent, that's a heck of a deal. And what happens is they do come in and you've heard anecdotal stories. They take over the apartment. We actually had two gentlemen from Springfield use a young woman's head as a battering ram. I'm sorry, Springfield Mass. Springfield, Massachusetts. Important clarification. Yes, and using someone's head, a young woman's head as a battering ram to throw her out of her own apartment. Now I'm stuck. I have two drug dealers that aren't on the lease in the apartment. And unless that tenant surrenders the apartment, I have no options. So we're dealing with a situation where they're getting in the buildings and I do not have the tools. We do not have the tools to remove them from the building. I've had more neighbors of BHA yelling at me on the phone about tenants that we have in our building that are dealing drugs or that aren't tenants that are dealing drugs. And my question is, are you yelling at the police department? Cause they're dealing drugs with impunity. You're talking 80 to 120 visits a day at an apartment. And at Decker Towers, that building is locked down like CIA headquarters. We have 1,000 pound latches on the front doors. We have cameras everywhere. And, but they're getting in because state of Vermont versus Dixon, 1999, states that a landlord cannot prevent ingress or egress to an apartment. That means that the Supreme Court of Vermont ruled that a drug dealer has a right that 80 of their visitors, their customers per se, can come in the building and buy their drugs. Because we as a landlord are not allowed to do that. Cause we as a landlord are not allowed to no trespass them. We can no trespass them from the common area. But if they're visiting Bob who's selling crack, they have a constitutional right. So we are being undulated with people seeking to buy drugs. And it's interesting. It's not just cocaine. We, they're actually, most of the dealers that we're dealing with are selling just about anything they can get their hands on. It's not a specialized shop. And so when they do come in the building, and I said all my buildings are very, very securely locked, but they're being let in. When they go to that apartment and they do secure their fix, they are inevitably going to the stairwells or going to the common areas or they're going to other apartments. And they are using their drug of choice there. Decker Towers has this 11 story, two 11 story stairwells. And I can't even tell you what we see every day. We, every morning we go in and we kick people out. And there are needles everywhere. There's feces on the floor. They, there's urine on the floor. There's trash. There's stolen items. There's tags. My God, I have a whole box of tags from Marshall's and whatnot. And so when we do tell them to leave, some leave, some are belligerent and they are armed. And they're there because they hustled all day for their fix and no one's going to get between them and their fix. Now we call the police and I'm not here to beat up Chief Murad. He was dealt a pretty horrible hand, but no one's coming, no one's coming. So we're now in a situation where our staff and our residents are facing this crisis with no support whatsoever. Our residents are trying to keep the building secure. The front door has to be open for a certain amount of time for wheelchairs and walkers. That means coat tailing is just gonna happen. And if you are a resident, I'm Edith and I'm in my walker and I hit the handicap button, door opens and this young man with a addiction wants his fix. He follows her in. If she turns around and this has happened actually many times and says, no, you can't enter. He just punches her or pushes her to the ground. That's assault. I have it on video, but nothing happens. And so our residents are living a terror. These Decker Tower, if you live in Decker Tower you're either elderly or you're what's called non-elderly disabled. So you're either disabled or you're elderly and they are very, very vulnerable. We are doing everything in our power to try to keep people out. We're doing everything in our power to make the building safer. We lock down all the common areas. We've done just everything except security guards which we can't afford. Remember, we're a public housing authority. The rents set somewhere like Decker are 750 a month including all utilities. So there's no cash there for us to spend on a rainy day. So here are my residents, they're not safe. They're not. I'm not safe in my own building. I had a gentleman yesterday morning at seven in the morning taking apart a stolen bicycle in the lobby of our building and I asked them to leave. And he's got boat cutters in one hand and wrench in the other. And he just looked at me and basically told me to off. The residents can't leave. We had enough problems. The mental health issues that we had after COVID are now because of the loneliness and the no not leaving your apartment. Well, now the people seeking to purchase drugs and the people dealing drugs are replacing COVID as that thing that forces them to stay in their apartment and continue to ruin their mental health. The thefts, we eventually had to buy a huge cage to lock up deliveries, but we were having people walking down the hallways. You just watch them. They just pick up every package they can and go. We've had people knock on doors. This is a traditional thing now. You're looking for your fix. And okay, I'll knock on Bob's door. I know it was so security payday. Bob opens his door, they push the door in and they rob him. And then they go floor down and they buy drugs. And then the filth. A lot of these drugs, a lot of the fentanyl is cut with, you know, laxatives. And so once you do have your fix, we've locked the bathrooms because inevitably every morning we're coming into theses blood and urine all over the bathrooms. So now they're, you gotta go, you gotta go. And it's in the hallways. We had washing machine yesterday and we had the stairwells. And we've had to actually pay a ridiculous amount of extra money for PPE because those are biohazards. And our cleaning crew, which is contracted now is being asked to clean up human waste. How do you live like this? I'm ashamed. I have more empathy than you could ever imagine. And it's my job to make sure that my residents are safe and my residents are happy. And I don't have the tools. I'm telling you right now, this is a call for help. I'm not here on behalf of my other executive directors for the PHAs, but I'll tell you right now we're crying for help. I wish that my tenants were only worried about drug dealing on the bike path. So they're worried about drug dealing next door to them. Now, how much longer do I have? I think it's been about 10 minutes. So I think I'll wrap up then. Look, I have three asks real quickly. It forced the laws that are already on the books to illegal to sell drugs. Why am I selling drugs for eight months in a public housing building with no arrest? That's a travesty. How can we as a community just say, I'm sorry there, drug dealer, nothing's gonna happen? I'm not trying to change the landlord tenant laws to take away rights of tenants, but it's taking eight to 12 months. I've got 80 people a day visiting Mary's apartment, 80 a day, and I can't evict Mary. We had one case that took us 15 months to evict a drug dealer that had an execution style murder in his apartment. 15 months. If I had gotten him out of three months, it would have saved us over $30,000 worth of damages, $30,000 in legal fees. And not only that, but let's talk about the other 13 residents that he threatened daily in that apartment complex. The young mother who had to go out and pick up needles on the ground before her daughter went to go to the school bus. Let's talk about them. And then finally, we need more judges. I'm due a rapid trial. I might be a public housing authority, but if someone is that egregious where we're evicting them. Remember, I have a whole group of counselors whose sole job is to keep people housed. We aren't out there. If you're getting evicted from BHA, you've done something bad. So that being said, we need more judges. We need to speak quicker process. Maybe, if I smoke crack on a school property right now, the fines are doubled. Why can't we do something like that? Because right now that drug dealer I told you about that took 15 months to be evicted and terrorized the community, we would not go to his apartment without a sheriff in order to repair the sink. He was arrested with drugs, 200 are fine. Thank you, Steven. For your information, on Friday, Senate judiciary is taking up evictions related to criminal activity. So I hope you will maybe listen in or contact Ben who's right behind you. And we'd certainly be willing if you wanted to comment on any of that testimony. It begins at around 10, 15 a.m., it all goes well. Yes, sir. So I see two questions and I'm reluctant to cut them off because I think this has been great. I see two questions. Behind you, Senator. Senator, I'm already excited to be in Hobson. Thank you, Senator Grum. Thank you, Steve, for your really compelling testimony. And I'm truly sorry you're having to deal with all of this. It sounds horrific for you and the tenants. I really appreciate that your number one thing that you suggested was that we enforce the laws that already exist because it seems to me that we do have laws on the books that should be addressing many of the things you just outlined. And it's kind of baffling to me that they're not being enforced. I don't live in Burlington and I don't wanna speculate about what's going on there. It's not fair for me to do that, but I don't understand why law enforcement isn't coming when what you're describing are blatant violations of law. So just, you don't have to necessarily respond. That's just my initial reaction. I'm shocked at that. And then the second thing, I would like more information if not from you from someone about the court case you mentioned and the fact that you're not allowed to evict or not allowed to prevent people from having 80 to 100 visitors each day. I mean, the situation you described was actually the tenant was no longer in the apartment. It was just being inhabited by drug dealers and the people visiting the apartment were visiting the drug dealers, not a tenant. So it seems to me that that wouldn't be part of the court decision. So I'm confused about that. I have to prove that the tenant is not in the apartment. And if you're a tenant and your apartment's been taken over by drug dealers, you're not telling me anything because they will attack you. They will, I wanna say that's... Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's fair. It just seems to me that there's, and I'm glad to hear that Senator judiciary might be taking this issue up, but it seems to me that there's got to be a way around that. But absolutely we need to enforce the laws that we have on the books. What you described is illegal activity period. And it's shocking. It's not being taken care of. So I'm really sorry you're in this situation. We have 62 police officers in Burlington. All right. I think we have to move on. I'll turn it over to Senator Lyons. Okay, there was another question. I just... Okay, we have six minutes for everything. Yes, let's move on. And it's really difficult for any witness to follow that witness because there are so many horrific issues that we've heard about and so much we would like to do solve the problem. But we do have a deputy commissioner, Eric Radke from the Department of Family Service Division. Good morning. Thank you for being here. And I understand that you'll have testimony, but I'm going to ask you a question up front. As we hear about families who've had to live in a car and then have been moved to a motel or a motel room with kids and maybe a single mother where they don't have the facilities and the things that they need to be successful. And then we hear about the needles outside the door, whether it's a hotel or a home, an apartment. And I'm asking you what services are provided for these folks and what authority does the department have, the agency have to enforce providing services or to bring in public safety officials to help? Thank you for that question, Senator Lyons. Good morning, everyone, for the record. My name is Eric Radke and I'm deputy commissioner of the Family Services Division of DCF. If those, the children are, it depends on whether the children are in custody or not, whether or not we were able to then provide supports and services for them as far as if they're in custody or if we even open a family case up to provide services, there's an opportunity for us to link them up with agencies in their community if it's a drug use issue, we can help them that way as far as getting, helping them as far as counseling. But I do have to tell you that there are limited services for counseling depending upon where you live and it's particularly limited if we're talking about teens with a drug or substance use issue. And as far as calling in police, we, if there's an issue where we have a child or youth in a hotel and there's an issue there, generally it is as far as the hotel owners that may call in police or something like that. So our services are generally when you're in our custody and then they, depending upon where you live, they can be limited as far as assistance for substance abuse. Did you have any other questions? Not this time, but I think you have prepared testimony. Yes. Basically, I just wanted to say, I really thank you all for the opportunity to speak about public safety. And specifically we were asked to talk about the impact of substance abuse on children and families and on the DCF system. The Family Services Division's mission is to engage families, foster and kin caregivers, partner agencies and the community to increase safety, well-being, permanence and law abidance for Vermont's most vulnerable children and youth. And one of the unique things about the system in Vermont is that the Family Services Division serves not only as the child welfare agency, but also the juvenile justice agency. So then we have issues as far as youth and families where there may be substance use and also teenagers where they may be using substances or participating in groups where there may be drug trafficking or violent crime as well. So I wanna talk a little bit about just how these issues come to our attention. So in the 12 district offices located throughout the state, there are front-end Family Services workers that conduct child abuse and neglect investigations and assessments, and their primary focus is on the immediate safety of children. These child safety interventions typically come from calls from our 24-7 hotline, also known as CIS, the Centralized Intake and Emergency Services Unit. So I do have a little bit of data for you. I'm sure all of you know about the challenges with our data system, but I have some numbers for you. In 2023, the Call Center received 52,143 reports of suspected child maltreatment. And the majority of those reports came into the hotline by mandated reporters, such as educators, healthcare workers, and law enforcement personnel. So of those calls, some 4,041 child safety interventions were open. And of those, 722 or 17.8% were cases where substance use was identified as a family factor. So by comparison in 2022, 20.9% of the accepted intakes involved substance use as a family factor. So the impact of these kinds of cases are absolutely devastating. Children have been placed at risk of harm and have had actual harm by ingesting drugs, such as fentanyl or xylazine, and children have also been neglected and left in unsafe situations because of parental drug abuse. And when we find these cases, they're really difficult to address through safety planning because if there's only one adult in the home, it's really hard to make such a plan. And there are also other critical considerations, real-life considerations that play during the life of these kinds of cases, such as maintaining a sense of normalcy for children, attachment for parents, as well as the issue of whether the child should be a part of the recovery journey of the parent if reunification is at issue. Worker safety is also a very serious concern in these cases, from possible exposure to harmful substances when making home visits, also plus environmental hazards associated with drug use or drug trafficking, such as dangerous individuals, firearms, or other weapons being present. Family services workers are absolutely committed to the safety of Vermont's children and youth. And it's important to me as leadership to be as committed to the safety of my workers as well. So with that, I do wanna turn things over to Nancy Miller. She's our child safety manager, and she'll discuss in more detail the safety assessment tools and the decision-making process that FSD uses in substance abuse cases. Is she up on the screen? She should be. She's zooming in. Yes. I have a brief question while you're doing that. Not a brief answer, but at some point, it would be helpful to understand the role that a Family Services Counselors Worker may have as a mandatory reporter. So working with a case, someone who's in the custody, and then noticing that there are concerns next door where someone's not in custody, we'll listen to Nancy Miller, and maybe if that, if there's a short answer, we'll look into that. Sure, I can take that. Can y'all hear me? Yeah, thank you. Okay, great. Hi, thank you everybody. As Erica said, my name is Nancy Miller. I am the child safety manager for Family Services Division. Your question related to a mandated reporter who is a counselor, who is living in an apartment or a hotel where some of these dangerous activities are taking place next door. Any mandated reporter in the state of Vermont who has a reasonable suspicion that a child is being abused or neglected has a duty to report that to our child protection hotline. Did you have a more specific question or does that cover it? No, that's good. We'll have you back in and we'll have folks back in to discuss that further. Thank you. Okay, great. So as Erica was mentioning, the way that we often get involved is the way that we do get involved with our child protection side of things in Family Services Division is through a call to our child protection hotline, such as the example that you were just asking about where a mandated reporter would make a call and report what's going on in the apartment next door. We often see cases involving parents experiencing substance use disorder come in under a definition of harm, statutory definition of harm referred to as risk of harm that lives in Title 33, Chapter 49, 12. And the definition is a significant danger that a child will suffer serious harm by other than accidental means, which harm would likely be likely to cause physical injury, sexual abuse as a result of, and there are six bullet points. I'm gonna read you just the, I'm not gonna read you all six and look up the definition if you'd like or I can provide it to you afterwards. But there is this, one of the bullet points is a single egregious act that has caused the child to get significant risk of serious physical injury. The production or pre-production of methamphetamines when a child is present, failing to provide supervision or care appropriate for the child's age or development due to the use of illegal substances or misuse of prescription drugs or alcohol and failure to provide us, failure to provide appropriately a child in a situation in which drugs, alcohol or drug paraphernalia are accessible to the child. So when we get valid information that meets one of those criteria then we can accept that for a child's safety intervention which would either be an assessment or an investigation because we have what's called a differential response system in Vermont. And then the very first thing that we do when we get involved with a child's safety intervention is to assess the immediate of a child. And when we're looking at cases where we have a caregiver who is experiencing substance use disorder, we don't make any sort of assumptions about whether or not the child is safe just based on that caregiver's substances. What we are looking at is the caregiver's behavior and the impact on the child of that behavior. And we utilize structured decision-making tools in Vermont which help sort of guide that assessment. When we are assessing safety regarding substances we are looking for things like whether or not the substance use is impairing the parent's ability to supervise their child, whether or not they will be unable to care for the child. And sometimes we see examples of children not attending school or not going for needed medical care. We see things like deterioration of condition of the home. We, as Erica mentioned, sometimes we unfortunately see things like accidental ingestion of opioids. And sometimes we see things like children observing adults in the home overdosing. And so what we are looking for when we're seeing those samples is what is the impact on the child? And this is a really, really delicate assessment because of age and developmental needs. So as you can imagine, a child under the age of three, for example, is completely reliant on their caregivers for their basic needs. And so if the caregiver is impaired to the point of not being able to meet the child's needs then that child is in danger. Whereas an older child who can meet their own needs such as feed themselves or pick up the phone and call 911 if needed or leave the environment, their well-being is certainly impacted and there may be a risk, but they might not be in immediate physical danger from their needs not being met. But that's just a little bit about the safety assessment process. And when we do find that a child is in immediate danger due to one of these situations being at play, the first thing we try to do with a family is safety plan. And as Erica mentioned, that can be really difficult when there's limited, when there's a limited family or a limited network. So what we really wanna do is pull in the safe adults in that child's life who can help the parent provide safety and sometimes that looks like an aunt or an uncle moving in temporarily or maybe it's a mother and the child going to stay with a family member or a sober friend while they attend to their treatment needs. If we're not able to safety plan then we do have to look to court to become involved when there's imminent danger again. And through court, we might see things like a conditional custody order being put in place or children coming actually into DCF custody. We also have a non-court involved pathway where we can provide services and those are referred to as family support cases. And those are voluntary. Nancy, thank you. I'm gonna ask that we kind of wrap your testimony at this point. So, because I think there is a question. I see a question. Yes, Senator Vihesti. Okay, I have a data question as I just wanna get a sense of who is being wrapped up in the system. And if you have any sense of what percentage of people who are being pulled into DCF involvement are living in poverty, struggling with substance use disorder. And this one's a harder one to frame, but the percentage of the parents that are involved, them were children that were involved. Does that make sense? That's an excellent question. The only data point I have at my fingertips is the one where you were asking about of the people involved in DCF, how many of the parents are substance abuse? And that's 17.8% for 2023. And it was 20.9% in 2022. So it's actually gone down. It has gone down slightly. And we did have more calls this last year as well. The other information I can try to get for you, I'll make sure we can work it out as best we can with our limitations because the idea of people that had been involved in DCF as a child and now are still involved and maybe experiencing poverty or if substance use, it is something that's really important to us because it makes us wonder, what about our services didn't help? Yeah, that is what I'm trying to think about is how to navigate this. And the other thing that I've heard, but I don't have the data to support is that there's an over-representation in the DCF system of people of color. Do you have data that supports or denies or? Our data system has just recently, we've been starting to track race data, but I do believe from various sources, we've pulled data that I can get for you. And I do believe it supports that contention. Oh, Nancy's gone. I was going to ask Nancy if she had anything to add. Yeah, I just want to make sure we're building equitable and responsive systems that work. So thank you for helping get me the data. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. And as we indicated earlier, written testimony sent in can be placed on each committee's web page. So that'd be very helpful. We'll do. Yeah, great. The next witnesses are Judge Zonay, Tom Zonay, Chief Superior Judge Terry Corson, State Court Administrator. I heard a witness say something about needing more judges. So maybe you want to comment on it. We agree. Very strongly. Thank you, Senator Sears and Senators Terry, Terry Corson State, oh, sorry. Terry Corson, State Court Administrator and Chief Superior Judge Tom Zonay. Thank you very much for the opportunity to give the Judiciary's perspective on this topic. We've been asked to focus primarily on backlogs in terms of its interplay with the public safety question. And what we're giving is a very summarized version of the materials that have been submitted to the website and we'll review them and obviously please ask any questions as we go through. In terms of backlogs, oftentimes they're measured by whether or not a case is beyond what's called a disposition guideline. Disposition guideline is per case type that says how long it would take for a case to typically process from start to disposition. And to be clear, the courts had backlogs before the pandemic. I worked in the courts for approximately nine years and I can attest to the fact that it was oftentimes a very much a triage kind of approach keeping your heads above water. I, in my view, I think because the courts were under resourced court staffs and judges but we definitely had backlogs before the pandemic. Unfortunately during the pandemic there were many factors that exacerbated that backlog situation. The primary factor especially regarding criminal cases was the shutdown of jury trials for over a year because of the health and safety restrictions. Courts were slowed. We weren't able to have the number of people especially in the older court houses. There were many isolation distance factors and jury trials were halted for a year. That meant that cases did not move. Oftentimes, and you'll hear from the state's attorneys and public defenders, they're oversaturated with cases. It's not until you have the jury draw or the jury trial push comes to shove you work to move and resolve the case. So without that motivation, many cases languished. That happened also in the civil docket although there are far fewer civil jury trials than criminal jury trials but that was the biggest single factor to slow down and cause the backlog in the criminal docket. Other factors were just purely coincidental. March 2020 is when the judiciary launched its electronic case management and electronic filing system right at the start of the pandemic and that in and of itself although it has many advantages and we're so grateful to have the electronic cases which fortunately when we pivoted to remote hearings that enabled people to participate and for us to access those cases remotely but it took time to implement those processes for court users, for court staff, for judges to learn the system to have it all installed and then to work with it. But that was a delaying factor not to mention having to scan thousands of cases into the electronic filing system. Another factor was the pivot to remote hearings. Before the pandemic, we might have had a phone on a bench and that was our ability or capability for remote hearings. One big silver lining of the pandemic is that we were able to pivot to remote hearings and use pandemic funds to purchase the equipment and install the equipment so that now every single courtroom in Vermont is equipped with the screens. Many of you I know we're at legislator days, you saw it in action. People can connect remotely, be seen on the screens and it's really enhanced access to justice but that also took time. It took time to kind of research what equipment was needed to install the equipment, to train on the equipment for both court staff, judges and court users. Fewer hearings could be scheduled in a hearing block with a remote hearing as you all experience also in the legislature as we all kind of got used to that format but it was a delaying it caused we couldn't schedule as many hearings as before. Lastly, many of our older courthouses had HVAC issues, heating ventilation. Again, it was great that we got pandemic money so that now courthouses are up to speed in terms of safe air ventilation but that also caused delays. Courthouses were closed for the renovations, et cetera. And the last single factor was workforce development related. As with many other workplaces people had to leave the workforce whether it was to stay home because their kids were during remote school or for safety reasons, whatever we had a lot of turnover in court staff which meant delays in terms of recruiting, then training. So those factors all together kind of combined to exacerbate as I mentioned the backlog. We were able to then resume court operations starting slowly in 2021 and then through the next year. Right now we're fully operational, able to take advantage of the remote hearing technologies and in our full speed ahead if you will. We have made progress in the backlog but it's been slow progress. I'm gonna say slow and steady. One big reason why we weren't able to make more progress is we had an unusually high number of judicial vacancies, seven total, five at one time for many months. And when you don't have judges sitting when you have vacancies you're not gonna have cases moving. So it impacted not just the courts where there were the vacancies but also the courts where judges were being and Judge Zone was like a chess master trying to move judges around to make sure that no cases were languishing in the courts where there were vacancies. But when you had a judge filling in in those courts that meant that their docket was being neglected by whatever percentage of time they were filling in on the vacancies. We're really grateful that those vacancies have all been filled and the new judges are training and we're really hoping to be able to make more progress. But I'm just, and I don't mean to be sound like I'm making excuses but that is one reason why we weren't able to make more progress in the backlog over the last year. We have some statistics that kind of just show one way to measure backlogs is number of pending cases period whether they're dispositional guidelines or not but the number of pending cases and this slide kind of shows from 2019 through 2023. In 2019 of the 15,000 cases filed in the criminal docket for example, the number of cases pending at the end of the year was 7,500. Then you see in 2020, that number even though the 11,000 more cases were filed the number of cases pending remained the same there was not progress. Yeah. I don't know if you want to judge so may to speak as well but we're calling it. Am I using up all our time? I don't think we can go through the slides this much in detail. Okay, great. Well, what Judge Sonny will address is what steps are being taken to address the backlog. Great. Yes, I think we're gonna get to me. Yeah, no, I don't appreciate that. It does kind of just show I guess slow but steady progress on the backlog. Thank you. We're using eight minutes as the mark. We have one minute 37 seconds left. We will make sure we do that. So let you know there is a witness who is not going to be able to testify so we'll stretch out some of that time from here. Well, that's... Two minutes. We have two minutes. Now the official number is three minutes and 20 seconds but Terry was talking about many of the different issues that we faced over the years as we all did during the pandemic and in whether it's the courts or other agencies. In addition to reopening and getting back where we were we had to make changes. And those changes weren't ones that the judiciary made and said, well, we're gonna do this because we want to and we are not gonna talk to stakeholders. We communicated with stakeholders. We convened meetings with stakeholders. We did user surveys. I know Senator Brock talks about that often about the importance of those types of matters about remote hearings and how we use them. And we tried to work with the various stakeholders and there's sometimes that we recognized the pressure that we put on in certain areas is gonna be felt somewhere else. If we wanna do more remote hearings with individuals who are in custody that impacts the Department of Corrections. If we want to do cases that are adding more cases onto the juvenile docket that impacts the attorneys who are involved and they are working all over the state. If we wanna add more cases involving landlord tenant well, that's gonna have other areas that are going to be affected. But what we did was we came up with statewide policies to try to make every county in our system work together in every unit. We also had unit specific plans that were developed to recognize the cultural and geographic differences that are inherent in any type of system we have in our state. Two minutes left. We continue to look at the cases. We have an ongoing review of the cases that we have on our docket. There's been data cleanup. Some cases were listed as active, but they weren't. So we went into the data and continued to look at the data to make sure it's accurate because so many of us rely on it. And you asked us about different statistics and things. We need to make sure the data is accurate. We also are setting next events in cases. That's an effective and important tool for case management. As opposed to someone leaving the courthouse going, geez, I wonder when I'm coming back again. It is ideal if we can say, well, your next hearing is on this date. And so even when we can't do that, we're trying to implement procedures that we do set that next hearing in a timely manner and get that in. We're using retired judges in many of the counties to fill in. And that's been very helpful. And we've also added jury trial days and trial dates. And that's where the new judges who have just been appointed and sworn in, they start working full-time as judges at the end of this month in a few weeks. And we expect to see results because we are increasing the number of jury trial days in the counties where we now have the additional judges. We're implementing new procedures to try to focus on certain types of cases without taking away from the other cases. Case in point, when you have a individual who is held without bail and they have to have a trial within 60 days, and that case may take four days and you have four trial days, you're not going to be able to get to that case involving a individual who might be charged with numerous counts of retail theft. And so what we're trying to do is set up other jury draws, but we might be able to address those other cases in a way that does not impact the cases that we need to hear. And so in doing that, it's a process that we have needs. And the needs that we have are ones that I will mention what Mr. Murray said, judges, we concur with Mr. Murray's assessment. There's three, we are asking for three judicial positions based upon where we are now. We've seen some legislation that goes in, we've asked to comment on, and that's in the House and the Senate this year, that frankly, if the bills pass, that number would have to be higher because it would add additional stress to the judiciary that we would need to be able to address. And we also need additional staff. And Terry? Well, 10 judicial assistants is just the number that we have estimated based on the formula that have an effectiveness coverage in response to Senator Brock's county in particular asking for a formula and a statewide number that would at least give us a bare minimum of coverage across all the units. So that's the number that resolved it. We made it. Thank you very much. Thank you. And if anyone has any questions, do not ever hesitate to stop us in the hall, send us emails and let us know. Thank you. For my big store. Oh, is there a rustle? Yeah. I wonder if Ron Scott-Pavett could, are there the floor a little bit? Sure. Just because you're both talking about Burlington Thank you very much. Does it work? We got Pavett here. Sarah Russell, are they both up on Zoom? We'll ask that question. Yeah. What are you doing? Oh, good morning. Thanks for being here. Sarah and Scott, are you comfortable offering testimony together? I mean, Sarah, you would go ahead and then Scott and then there may be some questions that relate. Yeah. And we'd certainly appreciate the full 10 minutes each. Absolutely. I can't. We're not scrubbing minutes. That's good. Eight minutes. So Sarah, why don't you introduce yourself to the record and then go ahead. I know that we've heard, our committee in particular has heard about the work that you've been doing, but I think it's helpful to get everyone engaged. Sure. Thank you for having me today. For the record, my name is Sarah Russell and I'm the special assistant to homelessness for the city of Burlington and the chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance. The city of Burlington and the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance have serious concerns and questions about AHS proposed plan to end the pandemic era motel program and instead support extending motel stays while we continue housing everyone which will be less expensive and more effective. We believe new investments and expansion of emergency shelters should be made for the hundreds of Vermonters who are currently living outside. Officials from AHS have reported new temporary shelters would serve about 225 people from the motel program which leaves a remaining five to 600 households from the June cohort without any kind after April 1st of 2024. It's widely known the households in the June cohort are comprised of our most vulnerable community members including families with children, elderly and people receiving home health services. Beginning with 256 households in the June cohort, Chittenden County social service providers have diligently connected over 130 households to permanent housing and other supports. According to the most recent data from economic services, the June cohort has been reduced to 116 households to date. That's in Chittenden County. The proposal and subsequent plan to prioritize these households for permanent housing placement is working just as we submitted in our letter of interest in June. If we stay on track, we can house everyone from the pandemic era motel program beginning June by hopefully June 1st of 24. If these households were to lose access to stable shelter on April 1st as AHS is proposing, providers will no longer be able to connect with them in the same way. Without the stability of shelter, households will no longer be able to focus on moving toward permanent housing as the priority becomes survival. In Chittenden County, the average wait time for households to be connected to housing navigation services is weeks from the time they enter our coordinated entry system. This will only be exacerbated by the forced exits from the stability of shelter within the motels. The cost projections for the proposed temporary shelters would shelter half as many people for twice as much money. The memos I will provide to the committee members lay out that math. Turning out hundreds more people in April to live without shelter is unacceptable. Any increase in emergency shelter capacity must be dedicated to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. In Chittenden County alone, the impact of the June 1st motel exits has resulted in a 500% increase in unsheltered homelessness from an estimated 42 individuals at the last point in time count in January of last year to over 250 individuals as of November of 2023. Local and statewide emergency motel capacity has been fully utilized. There is zero motel capacity in Chittenden County and no shelter capacity. There are about 350 shelter beds in Chittenden County and they are all full. Anecdotally, the mother I shared this last week who was about six days postpartum and had a two-year-old was referred by economic services to seek accommodation at Burlington's low barrier warming shelter for herself, her toddler and her infant. The warming shelter, which provides services to adults only, currently serves someone with cancer, someone with a colostomy bag and two pregnant people. In addition to many others with critical medical mental health and substance use challenges. Since beginning operation on December 15th, the shelter has been over anticipated capacity of 30 guests serving at least three nights. The shelter has provided bed nights to over 100 individuals turning people away each evening. Just this morning, when discussing plans for the extreme cold weather shelters in Chittenden County, we had to face the harsh reality that the shelter at the Miller Community Center accommodates up to 120 people, which falls 130 people short of ensuring that shelter for all during extreme cold weather events is available. This is unacceptable. Burlington has invested considerably in creating new outreach staff in BPD, parks and fire departments, and they are overwhelmed by encampments across parks and public lands where people are living in tents without access to heat, facilities or resources to meet their basic needs. As encampments grow, they become public health and JPC concerns most recently demonstrated by a fire and battery park over the last holiday, after over the holiday week. Aside from being in humane, increases in un-shelter homelessness result in exhausted emergency response systems, serious public health and safety issues, and crisis-oriented systems, which are not designed to operate in an indefinite manner. Finally, at first I felt concern that by delivering this testimony today during a public safety forum, we were conflating the challenges related to homelessness and public safety. However, what I wish to highlight is that people without shelter are far more vulnerable to violence and crime in our communities. Without the safety of a home, people living on sheltered are far more likely to be the victims of theft and assault, which are dangers they must confront on a daily basis. Without the stability of emergency shelter system, just as our clients cannot focus on permanent housing efforts, neither can we as service providers. Without clear communication and partnership, service providers, legislators and stakeholders continue to play catch up and are unable to be proactive. Should the motel program end, we must recognize that the work to end homelessness does not. What is needed now more than ever is stability of existing shelter, expansion of emergency shelter, reliance on best practices, including poor needed entry, adequate funding for services, and long range strategic leadership and planning and partnerships with local communities. Thank you. Thank you. And we look forward to posting your written testimony. There was a lot embedded in what you just said. So, and I think we'll keep moving along to Scott. Pavek. Yeah, thank you for having me today. Thank you for being here. Appreciate the opportunity. For the record, I'm Scott Havoc, the city of Burlington Substance Use Policy Analyst. I'm also a member of the Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee, as well as the governor's substance misuse prevention council, and I'm a person in recovery from opioid use disorder. In my role with the city, I facilitate the mayor's comm staff forum, which brings together local elected officials, policy makers, and advocates from across the prevention to recovery spectrum to discuss trends related to substance use. It is in this collaborative space that Mayor Weinberger and community partners spearheaded initiatives to end treatment weightless in our hub and spoke system, expand access to medication for opioid use disorder in jails and prisons, and introduce no barrier medication access via local syringe service programs. Innovative policy solutions, championed by Mayor Weinberger and implemented by local health organizations, stand out as markers of success, especially before the pandemic and fentanyl saturation of the illicit opioid market as evidenced by the decrease in fatal drug overdoses in Shannon County in 2018. For nearly a decade, my study advocacy and work focused on the causes of and responses to an ever worsening overdose death crisis. In the past few years, working with the city, I've witnessed the ways in which a now drug adulteration poisoning crisis has eroded the efficacy of treatment systems tailored to substance use disorder associated with dependency on prescription opioids or heroin. As a consequence of our inability to reform policies related to these systems of treatment and harm reduction, particularly individuals living with substance use disorder, specifically those at risk of housing insecurity or living in poverty, face increasing risk of accidental death and a host of non-fatal overdose harms. I reflected a little bit on what else is important to share with you today and have chosen to revise by unsubmitted testimony in effort of covering two brief media releases from Brown University that I'm happy to share with the committee after this meeting and two more points if I have time, but two releases from Brown University, the first one, fatal overdoses increase after police seized drugs study finds. A new study highlights an unintended consequence of interventions to combat the country's illicit opioid epidemic, emphasizing the need to include harm reduction strategies as part of a comprehensive response. So just quoting here and forgive me as I try to talk over some of the paper shuffling in the room. For decades, police have sought to seize illicit drugs as a cornerstone of strategy for disrupting drug markets and removing drugs from communities. But there's an unintended outcome when opioids have seized a new study finds, increases in overdoses, including those that are fatal. The study found that police drug seizures were associated with increases in fatal overdose in the surrounding geographic area in the three weeks following enforcement, possibly by leading people with substance use disorder to take greater risks when they tried to restore their supply. The study published in the American Journal of Public Health raises questions about policies that might be exacerbating overdoses during a persistent epidemic that is contributing to reductions in the nation's life expectancy. The findings provide evidence that efforts to disrupt drug markets can have unintended effects in generating public health harms. Brandon Del Pozo co-authored the study. Del Pozo, as you know, was Burlington's chief of police coming from New York City. He said the study highlighted the collateral consequences of law enforcement seizures of drugs. To be truly effective over dose of deaths, policing strategies need to be comprehensive. This means taking into account all the outcomes of police work, not just the effect of incapacitating drug dealers, but also seizing drugs disrupt sales in a community and how those disrupted sales affect usage patterns and how those usage patterns affect an individual's health and safety. According to this study, we have evidence that seizing opioids increases exposure to overdose, jumping really quickly to the other press release and gonna cut it short. But this is one study in a series of many repeated over almost four decades now. Overdose prevention centers where individuals can consume illicit drugs under the observation of trained staff are not associated with significant increases in crime, researchers found. When the researchers compared syringe service programs in New York City with two programs that were recently sanctioned by city officials to offer supervised drug consumption, they found no significant increases in crime recorded by the police or in calls for emergency service in the surrounding neighborhoods. The findings come as plans to open overdose prevention centers proceed in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and here in Vermont. While this data shows that if a neighborhood benefits from an established syringe service program, then adding the service of supervised drug consumption is not likely to increase reported crime, disorder complaints or related calls to 3-1-1 and 9-1-1. The person quoted here is Brandon Del Pozo again across two studies. Yet according to this study, Del Pozo said concerns about OPC caused crime and disorder are unfounded. This study is a replication of so many others in terms of producing the same results, finding that where overdose prevention centers are opened, that there are no increases in these crimes related to property crimes and properly discarded syringes, public nuisance. And if anything, there's a body of evidence to suggest that these operations may be associated with decreases in those crimes and neighborhood concerns. The reason why I highlight these two things is because I think I heard it conflated today that possibly enforcement and harm reduction are on opposite sides of a response spectrum and that's certainly not the case. It does very little to keep people safer by doing the easy thing of enforcing and locking people away without really care or concern for the social determinants of health that might trap them in the cycle of despair and desperation. That's all I have to share today. Thank you, Scott. And please do send your testimony in. It's extremely helpful to us. We're right in the middle of that type of decision-making. So we're going to move on to Peter Elwell, who is here. I believe he's here. On the Zoom. He's on the screen. On Zoom. He's on Zoom. That's what he's supposed to do. And some of us know Peter very well. Welcome. And thank you for being here. Thank you, Senator. Thank you for the broad cross-section of people that the three committees are including in the testimony today. It reflects the way you see this set of issues as complex and nuanced and not simple to identify specific causes and have easy answers to addressing those things. So very grateful that you've offered that. By way of introduction and for the record, I should note that when you said that I'm well-known to some of you, in large part that's because of a disclosure that I think I ought to make because there are certainly people in this meeting who don't know, but I have the good fortune to be married to Senator Wendy Harrison. And so, when she and I appear in public in meetings like this, we always want to make sure. You're out. You're out. Thank you, Senator Clarkson. I also am the Interim Executive Director at Groundworks Collaborative in Brattleboro. At Groundworks, we work with people and systems creating solutions to end hunger and homelessness. And we envision a community in which everyone has their basic needs met. Because that vision is still not a reality, we operate an emergency shelter with 34 beds and our bowl every night. We operate a food pantry that serves 4,000 people each year and salvages more than half a million dollars worth of food that would otherwise go to waste. We provide supportive services and community building at two permanent supportive housing sites and offer case management and a variety of other services to vulnerable Vermonters. I'm also here today on behalf of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, which is a collaboration of people and organizations who provide affordable housing and services to people who are unsheltered or precariously housed. I'm a member of HHAV's board. Finally, but I think also relevant to today's discussion, I served in municipal government for 36 years, 22 of those as a town manager. And from 2015 to 2022 was the town manager in Brattleboro. So in addition to bringing a homelessness service provider's perspective today, I also bring long and broad experience working on matters of community safety and law enforcement. Systemic failures have increased the amount of poverty in our society and the visible presence of poverty in our communities. Well, I believe and certainly hope that most of us feel compassion for the individuals experiencing extreme poverty. When we are addressing community impacts such as crime, we too often consider those same vulnerable individuals to be the problem. I urge that instead, we focus our energies on correcting the systemic failures that currently are causing more human suffering than we have seen before in our lifetimes. I wanna particularly note Sarah Russell's testimony in her comments a few moments ago. I thought it was really compelling of the details she shared. I had a little bit of information in my remarks as well to speak to some of how we see that showing up in Brattleboro and because of the tightness of time, I'm gonna abbreviate that portion and go back to speaking more generally about this situation and the way it interrelates with how we as a society and here in Vermont address poverty. So in looking at addressing the systemic failures, we need to be considering our housing and mental health and substance use and recovery. But we also have broader failures in our economic system that continue to dangerously and painfully widen the gap between those who are financially secure and the growing number of people and families who face financial insecurity, housing insecurity, food insecurity and more. A person experiencing homelessness is far more likely to be the victim of a crime than to commit one against another person. And you've heard from other speakers today how much more likely a person experiencing homelessness is to be a victim of crime than the broader general population. It's also true that people who experience crime in affordable housing communities are more likely to be victimized by crimes than to commit them. And we heard really powerful and disturbing testimony in that regard earlier today from students. And also commentary that was on point from Polly Major as well. Unfortunately, we often add to this trauma that is experienced by vulnerable people when we create well-intentioned social service programs that are so administratively burdensome that cause distress, missed opportunities, missed appointments, lost jobs and worse. One recent example that we're all familiar with was the requirement for people in the June cohort to endure frequent and onerous recertification process that exacerbated the hardship that many of us are experiencing. We know we can do better. While we need systemic solutions on many fronts, the one on which the HHAV is offering advice today is housing. We have offered specific recommendations to increase investment and flexibility to accelerate production of affordable housing, both rental and for purchase, to increase the amount of emergency shelter, to increase the scope and efficiency of the general assistance emergency housing program, and to increase and systemize programs that provide support services to people experiencing homelessness and to help people who are precariously housed to achieve stable and sustainable housing. We look forward to continuing to work with all of you in the weeks ahead on the details of those systemic solutions. Thank you. Thank you very much, that was very clear. And we will be, our committee at least will be working on the GA program. So it's helpful to hear your comment about that. We have four witnesses and witness categories left and Senator Ron Hinsdale and I've made a categorical decision about order. So we're going to begin with Teresa Vizina is not testifying nor is Matthew Valerio, but Jess Kirby is testifying director of client services for criminal justice reform. You on screen. Hi, yes, I'm here. Terrific, okay, well introduce yourself for the record and we'd like to hear your testimony. Okay, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here today. My name is Jess Kirby. I'm a yes director of client services at VCJR in Burlington where we have a recovery center working with justice involved people in Burlington on Bank Street and we have about 200 clients, most of whom are all have substance use disorder and most of whom are currently using and many people who are injecting drugs, many people who are experiencing overdoses very, very often. I also previously worked at Howard Center Safe Recovery as kind of the main case manager in the certain service program. And I'm a person with lived experience with opioid use disorder myself. I'm currently treated with methadone. I've been in recovery for over 10 years and I have experienced a lot of hardship related to that. I've experienced overdoses. I've been a victim of many crimes like we've been talking about. So many of my clients have people that I care about and I'm really glad that people have been making the point that people who are struggling, people who are homeless, people who are actively using drugs are much more likely to be victims of crime than anyone else. And I work with a lot of people who are victims of crime almost daily and are extremely vulnerable. I also know that options are really, really limited to people who are currently struggling with ongoing substance use and that treatment is really, really hard. We've done a really great job of expanding treatment. We have statewide network of recovery centers. We have treatment that is expanded so very much and a lot of treatment access, but there are many reasons why treatment is really hard for people, including the dangerousness and the potency and the way the drugs have changed is making it a lot harder for people to induct into buprenorphine. Methadone is very sparse as we know and I know that we're doing a lot of things to try to expand that. I'm also on the Opiate Settlement Advisory Committee and I'm really glad to see that we're prioritizing that and that the committee sees how important it is to expand access to methadone. But periods of use are always going to exist. People are going to have periods where they're using drugs and I think that we need to do, I think we need to do more to build up. We have a lot of our resources, our tip towards people who are in recovery and I think we need to do some things to balance that we need a lot more of a safety net for people who are still using. And I know we hear this said a lot about things like overdose prevention centers that people need to be alive in order to make it to the next phase and to safely transition into any other phase of recovery and to still be with us and that is very true and that's a big reason why I think we need overdose prevention centers. I talk to people every day about using a loan literally every day. People are really out of options and when we think about things like public safety, it is true that people are using in cars, people are using in parking garages, people are using in parks and in public places and in public bathrooms and all these places that sometimes cause public safety risks always cause, almost always cause very high overdose risk, overdose death risk and that something like overdose prevention centers are a way to do both to help with public safety, to bring people from using in parking garages and in public bathrooms and in public places where a variety of things can happen and bringing people inside where that's the true definition of meeting people where they are when we talk about harm reduction is really allowing people to safely use. When we talk about meeting people where they are, that is the way to do it while people are using, not like syringe exchange is important, we get people syringes before they use but then they go do the most dangerous part on their own. So we know that people are using on their own, we know people are using in parking lots and cars and we know that people are using in public bathrooms by themselves and it only takes minutes for people to die. So having OPCs is giving an opportunity to bring people into a structured safe medical setting and it is absolutely making those people who are most at risk safer but making everyone safer. And I really just appreciate so much how our legislature has done so much to hear out all sides of this and expand resources for people who are using drugs, expand treatment. I really do think we've come so far and done a really awesome job of responding to what's going on now with the dangerousness of our drug supply. And I think that like our next step is to really build up our safety net for people that are still using. And the way that we really need to do that is to provide safely is for people to use drugs. People are not going to make it to the next phase of recovery if they aren't alive, if they aren't. And we know that people will definitely be more likely to access treatment. I was working in syringe exchange for seven years. I know that's how I got treatment, but also an OPC that's a deeper way to connect with people for longer periods of time. For during the moment, people are very distracted with complex needs when they need to use in order to curb withdrawal symptoms and feel better and all of those things. And to be able to do that in a setting that's safe and structured and with providers that it's the ultimate way to show people that you're really meeting them where they are and how much you care. And to be ready to help people move to those next phases. And I just really think that that's the next, the next right step for Vermont to take. And I know Burlington is really serious about overdose prevention centers. They've had three resolutions over multiple years and multiple, you know, in elections and the mayor has been so supportive. And, you know, I think Burlington really feels ready and that that is what is needed in order to keep people alive and promote public safety. So that's what I got. Okay. All right. I think Timothy Luder is next. Down the list, Senator Sears. I don't have them on my list. Is she on the list? No, she was on the last one. Oh, okay. Deputy Commissioner. So we were hoping if Shabnam is on the phone, since she is running a major youth center, we might go to her. I agree. She wasn't gonna get on about this time so that someone who's not usually in the building gets to. I don't know if you want me to speak. We're easy over here. Is Shabnam on? I am. Okay. Thank you, Shabnam. So you can introduce yourself, but Shabnam Beth Nolan is the executive director of the King Street Center in Burlington. Thank you for being with us on short notice. Well, thank you for having me here today as you hear from a wide array of people about public safety. For the record, my name is Shabnam Nolan. I'm the executive director of King Street Center located in downtown Burlington. King Street Center is a youth development organization whose mission is to empower youth to explore their talents and find their voice through learning, play, and opportunity. Today, we serve more than 150 youth touching the lives of over 400 community members. There are early childhood education, kindergarten through fifth grade, teen and mentoring programs. Many of the families we serve have experienced great hardship from growing up in generational poverty here in Vermont to being forced to leave their home country and arrive in our community as refugees. And all are deeply committed to ensuring their children have more opportunities and success than they were able to have growing up. If you'll indulge me for a moment, I want you to imagine that you're 14 years old. You're starting high school and are already being asked what you want to do when you grow up or what college you want to go to. The truth is, you have no idea. Right now, you are just trying to navigate everyday life, social, shares, academic, and family expectations. Where would you even start? You have more responsibilities than a lot of kids in your grade. Your parents work really hard, have nontraditional work hours, and you have to take on an after-school job and or be responsible for your younger siblings. Even if you wanted to figure out what your future might hold, you simply cannot add that to the list of things to general. Seeing a future for yourself right now just isn't a reality. Now, layer on top of that, you come from a family where your parents have their own history of trauma or perhaps they have a substance use disorder. Or you have no permanent home and jump from place to place. Maybe they don't speak or read English well and haven't been able to support you in your academics. Or maybe, as many of our kids do, you live in an apartment building where your neighbors are regularly engaged in criminal activity, keeping you in a constant state of flight or fight. For many kids in all of our communities across Vermont, including the kids King Street serves, this is their experience. The reality is that for low-income families, every member is responsible for the overall well-being of the household. Being a trusted partner to many families, it is clear that parents want nothing more than for their child to find a successful path in life. Yet for these kids, limited financial resources translates to little choice in life. There is only room to think about survival. I'm sure you've heard a lot of facts and figures about crime and who is or is not committing them as you explore public safety solutions. You may be hearing calls for increased investments in our criminal justice system and considering tougher laws to hold people accountable. I want you to know that King Street Center is in the center of all the acts of crime and violence happening in Burlington right now as we are located near City Hall Park and in significant drug activity areas. Not only is that where our center is, but over 95% of our kids and families live within a three-block radius. We have absolutely been impacted by what is going on. We've needed to invest money that we did not plan on in securing the safety of our youth and staff. We have been in lockdowns more than once this past year as police surround the building while running after someone with a gun in our backyard on our playground. We have to do daily sweeps of the playground, often finding needles or bags where our children play. This is alarming and it is unacceptable. But I'm here today to warn you of the danger of defining public safety entirely as an enforcement issue. You can add new crimes to the books, you can make tougher sentences and you can add more resources to harm reduction. But none of that will stop the flow of more kids getting involved in street-level violence, especially those who are so close to it like street kids. The kids we serve have a responsibility to help financially support their families. Right now, there is an immense amount of demand for drugs in our communities and basic principles of economics tells us that when there is an increase in demand, there is an accompanying increase in supply. We know that for a fact, drug dealers look to poor kids to supply their drugs. It's already happening. And it is these kids who will be the target of the increased enforcement. If kids don't feel that they have a choice because they don't have access to safe positive spaces to go to during the hours they're out of school, this is their reality. So I urge you to think about keeping youth safe as a part of your public safety strategy. Right now, one in four kids in Vermont have no place to go to outside of school hours when we know that the hours after school between three and six PM show some of the riskiest behaviors for youth. It is a fact that kids need safe, supportive environments that help them have choices, choices that help prevent them from being pulled into risky behavior like supplying drugs. If the state does not increase its investment in out of school, after school and youth development programs as part of its public safety strategy, then all we're going to do is fill the prisons with more kids. And that is not the Vermont way. We are proud of how much we support youth in this state. And it would be a mistake not to carry that ethos forward to this important conversation. There is not enough programming like King Street Center across the state. And there is very little state funding for the programs that do exist. So I hate to do this because you're on a good place as far as we're concerned in terms of prevention, but we've got four other people who have wanted to testify. We're going to have to structure the rest of the meeting very briefly. So. Has a man in the visual. Right, yeah, yeah. We'll have to have, and so thank you for your testimony and please do send it in so that we might post it. And I know we've had had you in before to do that. And then we have, we have Deputy Commissioner Adity from Department of Health. We have Deputy Commissioner Interim Gray and we have Director Sojourner all waiting to testify. And I'm going to suggest, I know that Deputy Commissioner Gray has a hard cut off at 12. Director Sojourner, Lily, can you provide just a couple of comments and then? I have meetings. And we all have meetings at 12 o'clock, but I'm asking each of you online, would you be willing to postpone and come into our committees at another time? That's probably the best question to ask. Yes, that works for me, Madam Chair. Yes, with sincere apologies about the timing on this because I know how valuable your time is. You're just as crunched as we are. What about Deputy Commissioner Gray and Director Europe? I haven't found, they're actually both. Deputy Commissioner Gray had to step up. I know. I'm Director Sojourner is outside. They're fine to pre-schedule. Okay, so, and they are folks that we can bring in another time. And then I think that we'll probably do it for us. This has been a long morning. It's been an amazing morning in terms of connecting public safety, health and welfare, housing in a variety of ways. So let's say you're differently from my colleagues, we will call this a wrap and say, go off live. Thank you so much.