 Okay. Well, today is Thursday, May 27th, 2021. My name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Cannabis Control Board that was established in Act 164 of 2020. I see that it's now 1030, so I will call to order this inaugural meeting of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board. Before I dive into our agenda for the day, I'd like to take a brief moment to thank all of the people that played a part in getting Act 164 across the finish line. I hate to mention people by name because I know that I'm inevitably going to leave someone out, but I would like to thank the two Judiciary Committees, Senator Sears, Representative Grad in particular, for taking the lead early on and for laying the groundwork for a more equitable marketplace through the criminal justice reform initiatives that they had I'd like to thank the GOV-OPS Committees and Senator White and Representative Copeland-Honsis for the deep dives you did on setting up a structure that honors small cultivators, minority-owned businesses, local towns, and invests in education, prevention, and treatment. I'd like to thank Legislative Council Michelle Childs, who's been the lead attorney on cannabis policy in the legislature and has probably drafted more bills and amendments on this issue than we've seen on any other issue in the state. I'd like to thank the Governor and his cabinet both for the support they've given our Board, as well as their constant drumbeat for consumer protection, highway safety, youth prevention, and social equity. Act 164 and S-25 empower the Board to deliver on these promises. I'd like to thank my fellow Board members and our new program tech for your tenacity and persistence in setting up this new agency and for your commitment to getting cannabis policy in Vermont right. And of course, big societal shifts like this do not occur without the voices of hundreds and in this case thousands of Vermonters calling for change. I'd like to thank the people who braved the stigma and the public backlash and openly spoke about this issue in the public hearings with their friends, neighbors, and legislators, wrote letters to the editor, and contributed in any way to the ideas that are in Act 164. We as a Board are now picking up the torch and I'm particularly excited because while Julie, Kyle, and I have been working behind the scenes to build the infrastructure of the Board, we have not had an opportunity to discuss together our vision for the work ahead. I thought it would be appropriate at our first meeting for us to briefly introduce ourselves, talk about why we chose to accept this responsibility, and share some of our thoughts on the future of adult and medical use cannabis in Vermont. So I will start. Again, my name is James Pepper. Prior to the pandemic, I lived in Montpelier with my wife and our identical two-year-old twins a little over a year ago. We made the difficult choice to withdraw our kids from childcare and move back in with my wife's parents and her grandmother in her hometown of Newbury, Vermont. So very often the background of my Zoom meetings is my wife's childhood bedroom and you can very often hear four identical feet running across the floor in the background. My entry into cannabis policy occurred about six years ago when I was a policy advisor to then Governor Peter Shumlin and was given the job of developing a tax and regulate framework for Vermont. At that point, the state head recently received a report from the Rand Drug Policy Research Center that suggested roughly 80,000 Vermonters consume cannabis regularly. When you see something like that, a question comes to mind. What other product that so many people are using with such regularity doesn't have to comply with any sort of minimum safety requirements. For me, at that point, cannabis policy really became a consumer protection issue. But of course, once you start down the path of tax and regulate, it very quickly becomes clear just how complicated the politics and the bureaucracy of cannabis has become over the past 90 plus years. We did a decent job at the time of untangling some of the complications around criminal penalties and expungements, banking and insurance, energy and land use policies. But in many ways, Vermont was not ready for a tax and regulate system at that point. Since then, I've continued to work on cannabis policy and criminal justice reform for the Department of State's attorneys and sheriffs. I was the designee to the Governor's Marijuana Advisory Committee where I served on the Roadway Safety Subcommittee. I completed the Drug Recognition Expert Course and Field Work Certification. I helped pass and implement three expungement bills that have resulted in over 25,000 expungement orders in the past three years. And this does not include the over 12,000 automatic expungements that the courts are currently executing for historic cannabis possession convictions. I've served on the racial disparities in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Advisory Panel since 2017 and helped draft their most recent report calling for the development of the Bureau of Racial Justice Statistics. And I've also helped implement justice reinvestment, bail reform, raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction, use of forced legislation and others. All of these have played a small part in helping to make Vermont a more equitable and safe place. I'm now back doing cannabis policy full time. At this stage, it's difficult to know how this board and our mission will evolve, but I think it's important for the benefit of my fellow board members and for the people paying attention that I lay out some of the guiding principles that I intend to use as my metrics for success for this industry five, 10, 15 years out. So first is maintaining a patient-centric medical use program that seamlessly provides continuity of services and a diversity of products for the people on the registry. Second, building a diverse and equitable adult use marketplace that builds upon Vermont's competitive advantages and can sustain and thrive in an eventual transition to federal legalization. Third would be providing Vermonters the ability to purchase cannabis products over the counter that have been tested, labeled, packaged, and are free from heavy metals, pesticides, contaminants, and adulterants. Fourth, we've invested in critical substance use prevention treatment and educational resources, and we've actually started to see a reversal in some of the trends among our youth related to perception of harm and eases of access. And finally, that we have a sustainable revenue stream dedicated to correcting the second and third order effects of prohibition and economically empowering those most directly impacted by the war on drugs. Not all of these goals will be achievable by some of the deadlines that are laid out in Act 164, but I am setting these as my guiding principles and I will make sure that the decisions I make are in service to these aspirations. So with that, I'd like to turn things over to Julie for an introduction and just for any of your thoughts. Sure. Thank you very much, James. I appreciate that. As you said, we've not had a chance to really talk about this, so getting that insight is very much appreciated. I also will begin by saying some thanks to the Cannabis Control Board Nominating Committee, the Governor's Office, Governor Scott, and the Senate for appointing me to this role. I'd especially like to thank Senator Rahm for her generous report on the Senate floor. I think also I'll share with all of you that public service and ensuring public trust are values that are near and dear to my heart. I've had the opportunity to serve my state and my community in many ways. Most recently, I was the chair of the Vermont State Ethics Commission and a member of my local select board, which is a seat I won thanks to some supportive friends and family and my campaign team, which essentially was my husband and my two children, my two teenage sons. I'm a graduate of NVU Johnson and I have a degree in hotel hospitality management and I hold two professional certifications that require demonstrated business acumen and an understanding of the legal implications of organizational policy. Prior to my appointment to the board, I was the HR director for the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation and prior to that, I served in the city of Winooski, where I worked closely with city leaders and community members on the city's equity and inclusion efforts. In that role, I had a personal goal of developing an employee population that reflected the city's diverse resident population. In the time I worked for Winooski, the diversity of the employee population increased by almost 10%. I didn't achieve my goal, but it was a start. I come to this role with the knowledge that regulating the sale of cannabis will not cure all ills, nor will it right the wrongs of the past. We know that people of color and those who are economically disadvantaged have been disproportionately impacted by the prohibition of cannabis. We also know that close to 50% of cannabis sales in the legal markets of other states are transacted by women and in the private sector, we know that organizations that prioritize diversity are more likely to have returns above their industry medians. Equity, therefore, is the thread that stitches together good policy, good business practice, and a thriving community. As a seven generation Vermonter and the granddaughter of small town entrepreneurs, I recognize that we not only have an historic role in creating a foundation for this industry in our home state. We also have a historic responsibility to build a foundation for which inclusive and restorative practices are the cornerstone. Additionally, in my professional experience managing leave of absence and health insurance programs, I've spoken to countless individuals over the years who they themselves or a loved one were managing chronic pain or cancer or another illness and who were concerned about access to treatment. Those who sought symptom relief through medical cannabis were concerned about stigmatization, especially that that could impact their families and their jobs. Ensuring that the medical cannabis program and the adult use market coexist successfully is personally important to me. So as our brave little seats and I should say our brave little board of three dives into this work, I acknowledge that we have quite the road ahead of us and there's much work to be done. I've been delighted to understand the level of enthusiasm for this work among my fellow board members and pleased to find that it matches my own. I also acknowledge that there may be times as there are with anything that's new and any new system that we build that it may feel a little bit like like chaos. And you know, I'll offer that same leadership is a challenge that our board will need to maintain as we take in new information and develop this and throughout this process. So I have a guiding quote that I'll share that's my North Star just to give you a sense of who I am and and my own personal direction. And it's from our author Margaret Wheatley who talks about same leadership and she describes that idea as the idea that more is possible when we engage together throughout a thoughtful process. And in her book she says and I have this on my desk as well. She says same leadership is developing the capacity to observe what's going on in the whole system and then either reflect that back or bring people together to consider where we are now. So again I offer that as my sort of North Star and I know it's something that I will come back to as we collaborate and engage in this process. I think with that I'll just say that I'm grateful for this opportunity to build a program that Vermonters can trust and that is safe for Vermonters and I hope to serve you all well. And I think I'll turn it over to Kyle. Thank you. Thank you James and Julie and good morning to everybody. Those are too hard acts to follow up. Those are great overviews of guiding principles and as James and Julie both alluded to we've done a lot of building this agency from the ground up over the last a month or so to get us to this point and I want to thank you for your tenacity and getting us here. It has been a brave new world setting up a state agency in Tanele who has joined us recently and kept us straight as we've been trying to get organized for this meeting. I want to thank Governor Scott for the opportunity for various legislative committees for believing in what I had to say in my vision for a cannabis program in the state of Vermont. But first and foremost I want to thank everybody who has spoken in any legislative committee as James alluded to to get this program to this point and I want to thank everybody that's here today listening to this introductory inaugural meeting of the Cannabis Control Board. Anybody who will be listening to this recording in the future and everybody that will be sailing upwind with us as we look to try and work to meet deadlines that you know feel kind of far away but in reality they're they're fast approaching. I think the whole pandemic situation has taught us that time can be fast and slow at the same time. For those that don't know me my name is Kyle Harris. I first came to the state of Vermont in 2012 to attend Vermont Law School where I graduated in 2015 with a law degree and a master's in environmental policy certificate and water law and I immediately fell in love with everything Vermont stands for continues to stand for and provides its sense of community the small type of diverse trying to diversify an agricultural state that has been agricultural stalwart in the New England area and across the nation for its sense of for its sense of culture for its sense of craft. I'm originally from Maryland so don't hold that against me. Julie's the seventh generation of Vermont and I am a I guess I'm not even a first gen I guess I'm I'll call myself a Vermont or hopefully no has any arguments with that. I've been in I moved after after law school I did move to Washington D.C. there I took a position in the ag and environmental world with a with a national trade association the corn refiner's association where I was the the environmental council for about 14 percent well I should say associate environmental council for about 14 percent of the US corn supply focusing on corn based products and what my number one goal in that position was to look at the future the 21st century usage of corn how can we take a step back from a lot of the more commodity based sources of revenue that a lot of our big ag processor friends across the nation have traditionally made a lot of money doing which was primarily high fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners and position agricultural producers for a little bit more 21st century product focus I have launched the plant based products council where we looked to really look at a feedstock agnostic approach how we can use agricultural products to displace petroleum based products that included recyclable products and compostable products and I I enjoyed being close to home I enjoyed Washington D.C. to an extent I did a lot of work with federal agencies I helped I helped advocate certain positions in the farm bill and I found it I found it rewarding in a sense but I did not get what I wanted to get out of working in Washington D.C. It's it's an interesting place I'm sure many on the phone are familiar with it working there I miss the sense of community it's easy to be inside the beltway in D.C. and feel like you're doing something and not feeling that sense of community and so an opportunity arose for me to go back and work or come back to Vermont and work for the Vermont agency of agriculture for food and markets in the summer of 2019 and I have been in Vermont with my wife Kate living in Montpelier ever since at the Vermont agency of agriculture food and markets I was an agriculture development specialist it was a brand new position created where I was serving as a liaison of sorts between the agency of agriculture and ACCD the agency of commerce and community development there I had the pleasure of working not just in one specific division part of the agency of agriculture I had my hands in just about everything based off of the policy experience that I could help shepherd some programs in my time in D.C. I managed our Acer grant which is a lot of maple marketing activities I helped get the dairy business innovation center off the ground I was the the agriculture development liaison to the hemp team I drafted the initial comments on USDA's interim final rule for hemp production I had the pleasure of traveling with Secretary Tevitz to D.C. to talk about hemp right before the pandemic started I was working with the Working Lands Enterprise Board to try and get hemp producers eligible to take part in some state-funded grant programs trying to figure out a path forward with USDA to get hemp producers a little bit more involved with some of USDA's grants recognizing that USDA had not approved Vermont State Plan and I think hopefully that will happen over the course of 2021 I took the I found interest in this position because I wanted to continue helping to set a path forward for the community the agriculture community in Vermont my first introduction to agriculture in Vermont from a working professional perspective was helping to draft the food and agriculture systems plan for 2021 to 2030 with the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund and that that huge plan I wrote a couple different briefs I wrote the future of ag policy brief in addition to some other briefs and had an opportunity to meet greet so many different people from so many diverse position points within the Vermont agricultural community and I learned issues I learned how many great and awesome people are in this state trying to advance and diversify our agricultural portfolio and I saw it starting to move the needle with hemp and I was tracking what was going on in the adult use side of the equation in Vermont from from the get-go and across the nation as other states have really found success and shortfalls and all points in between as it relates to regulating an adult use market in addition to a medical market and when I saw this opportunity jump I just I had to throw my hat into the ring I wanted to be part of setting a regulatory system that is user friendly that is equitable and that everybody can really be proud of from the get-go and that's a rare opportunity in today's world and my sense of community you know I was raised on a small red Angus farm in the state of Maryland my dad's a veterinarian my mother's a dietitian I've always had this kind of humanitarian benevolence about the way I approach my work I've been able to kind of stay and on the sidelines and look at a lot of our small cultivators producers processors in the state and talk with many of you I think all the all the COVID relief funds pointed me away from getting to know a little bit more about know a little bit more about you than I would have intended to over the course of 2020 I look forward to working with everybody I think the foundation of the cannabis control board needs to be rooted in a public input your input and your comments are going to help James Julie and I shepherd this program into one that we can all be proud of small cultivators need to pay pay a large part in this marketplace I think there's room for everybody no matter your size but I think there needs to be special attention paid to how Vermont has traditionally gone about its agricultural diversification and how we can look to maintain a sense of Vermont pride as more programs come online around us in New Jersey and New York with Massachusetts right to the south of us and may not too far away it's going to be a long ride it's going to be a fun one I am so looking forward to this I think you know James kind of alluded earlier to the fact that we haven't really had an opportunity to talk too much about our vision and I am so delighted to hear Julie and James's vision and priorities for this board this needs to be rooted in equity it needs to pay close and special attention to our small cultivators at the end of the day what I'll hang my hat on is no matter if you are a producer processor you know consumer advocate advocate against cannabis not interested at all in taking place in this marketplace it doesn't necessarily matter to me from what angle you approach this this new market budding market in the state of Vermont but I want everybody to be proud of what we've created and it's something that we can all at the end of the day say this fits Vermont this fits what we hold as a core set of values as other states look to what we what we're going to be doing and if we can take Vermont and the cannabis program here and turn it into the gold standard for other rural states that are looking to adopt a similar type of program that's where I'll find success and hang my hat so James I know we're running a little bit ahead of schedule but I think that'll include Maya Martz thank you both Julie and Kyle that was really great and I'm very happy to hear about your vision for Vermont Nellie I know you're managing a complex meeting schedule here and you have a 14-month-old but would you mind just saying hello and introducing yourself Nellie is our program technician and she will be in many ways receiving public comments and making sure that we are attentive to the public yes I will pop in and say hello um I apologize if you hear a cranky baby in the background um yeah my name is Nellie Marvel I'm the program technician here Monday was my first day so really just doing my best to hit the ground running here um and I am coming here most recently from a position with the Vermont legislature it was the committee clerk for the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare um and yeah prior to that I come from a long history of you know various uh a couple different positions in uh in uh more the legislative side of government as well as the environmental nonprofit world doing a lot of a lot of fundraising as well so um I live in Montpelier as well with my husband and my uh my 15-month-old son who was born right at the beginning of the pandemic um so this has been uh this has been a funny new normal for for all of us um I wasn't anticipating making comments I don't have a whole long thing uh prepared but uh that's that's me and I'm very glad to be here thank you Nellie we're very lucky to have you as well um so I'm just gonna look ahead at our agenda for today um uh we will be hearing um from uh director of racial equity Susanna Davis next um we will be getting trainings after our lunch break um on open meeting law and complying with the open meeting laws in the state um complying with the public record acts in the state um we'll I'll give everyone an update on where we stand um with our executive director search and our consulting services search um and then I'd like to just give a quick um flag for our public comment period um we've never done this before forces our inaugural meeting um we have some time set aside uh at 1 50 this afternoon for public comments um and if anyone feels uncomfortable voicing their comments publicly um we do have um an online portal on our website for submitting written comments um that address is ccb.vermont.gov forward slash form forward slash public input form so once again ccb.vermont.gov forward slash form forward slash public input form um and you you can always submit comments through there um Nellie um will also uh you know her email address is on our agenda if there's things that you'd like to um have the board consider please feel free to reach out to Nellie um Tim I hate to call you out on this but uh just I um I think it would make sense for us to turn off participants videos um just so that there's no confusion in the public as to who's on the committee and um who our executive director is for instance um so um and Nellie can help manage that a little bit as well but I appreciate that um it looks like um we're I don't see Susanna on quite yet so maybe it makes sense Nellie for us to take just a three minute uh you know stretch break uh stretch our legs and um then we'll all come back on when Susanna is able to join us so could you if you don't mind just pop up the um that kind of break uh screen uh we'll do one second we're still waiting on um Susanna but I'm thinking that maybe we can look at some other parts of the agenda while while we wait so it might be good to open the meeting back up Mr. Chair I am here oh I'm so sorry no it's all good because I'm not really here because I'm still having trouble getting my screen sharing so okay I'm here as a ghost right now okay I apologize um if you're if you have additional technical difficulties you could probably email Nellie the presentation she could you know moderate it but um thank you I think I'm gonna right now actually I apologize for being late but Nellie I will email right now with the slides and I just made you a presenter so you should be able to share your screen now I apologize I didn't see that you had joined have just sent those over and in the meantime let's frame the discussion a little bit so thank you for having me I'm very pleased to be here and this is the first of many discussions that we're going to have about equity in particular how the board can center equity in its work I think we all know that it was a huge lift to get the cannabis legislation passed that has been passed over the last year and yet we know that there's a whole lot more that needs to be done I think others will will share my sentiment that equity was not adequately addressed in that process and so for the board I I am going to present the following information for your consideration and how you end up going about your work I did advance some slides to you all sort of primer slides on equity I know that I sent those over very very close to this meeting so it it's perfectly fine if you haven't had a chance to review them yet we're going to recap them a little bit today I'm also going to talk super fast because I'm very bad at time management so thank you in advance for your patience well I just thank you honestly for just you have an impossible task not impossible you have an impossibly busy schedule I should say and things that you need to accomplish so I know that we are statutorily going to be working with you on a number of issues pursuant to act 164 and s25 I you know we're not ready as a board quite yet to get into the substance of either of those pieces of legislation but it's I'm just so thrilled that you're able to find some time with us today and to help center us so thank you ditto thank you yeah of course it's my pleasure thank you all um nely if you are able to bring up those slides one minute I apologize they came through on my phone haven't come through on my computer yet oh no we're gonna make it everyone we really are I just got them let me just open them up and if you could do me a solid let's skip that first slide really fast so nobody notices that I forgot to change the date thanks all right so um board members first I'm gonna recap some of the slides that I had sent you before I'm gonna go through these super fast because I hope that they're pretty self explanatory but I just want to set this up a little bit um as an introduction to equity so this and the next slide show um illustrations of the difference of equity and equality you can see equality on the left is more um access of uh resources and equity is more uh I'm sorry what is it equity of access or equity of resources and then on the right is equality of outcomes I'm so sorry on the left we're centering the resources and on the right we're centering the outcomes right if you um we go to the next slide you'll see something similar um in another depiction with bicycles right on the top we're seeing everyone's getting the same bike that's not working for the small person the tall person and the person who uses a wheelchair on the bottom we can have our wonderful uh figurative bike parade because everyone has been tweeted in a way that is best suited to that person's needs so that's what we're talking about we talk about the difference between equity and equality and that's really important particularly with the board's work because as we consider what are the the policies and the the structures that we're going to need to set up for Ramon's cannabis industry it's going to have to it's going to have to reflect less of a sort of equal or equal treatment across the board and it's really going to have to take into account historical and present day barriers and discrimination that prevent people from again being able to participate in the figurative bike parade that is cannabis in Vermont. Our next slide uh I just want to show a little bit about implicit bias we know that the human mind is bombarded with stimuli all day long we take in 11 million pieces of information a second and yet we're only really consciously aware of 40 of them for example did you know that you can always see your nose that's right your brain just chooses to ignore it so we're ignoring most of the stimuli that um that we're coming across and if we could go to next slide please um for that reason we end up taking a lot of men's shortcuts that leads us to things like implicit bias right it is why people in certain professions look at a person who looks like me and make certain assumptions and judgment about level of education or criminality or health outcomes etc our next slide shows us a little bit about where those shortcuts come from right our family our peers news and media experiences we've had community and schooling etc these are all the sources of implicit bias on our next slide you'll see one example right a children's book that I believe is no longer in print um that is well counter racist our next slide shows something similar again another um book for children but it's depicting words like happy and proud and picturing that with um white faces and then sad and angry picturing those with brown faces right these are things that we're giving to people in their formative years as children you also saw the next slide which talks a little bit about other forms of bias we talk about how height and skin tone and hair texture and the visibility of one's disabilities may lead to biases in the workplace and in society the next one two three slides pointed to research having to do with perceptions of criminality particularly for black boys and with the way that people internalize messages about race through things like Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll tests and I urge you that the clip that I've put here in that slide no I think I sent it to you as a pdf actually which tells me you didn't see the clip so I will send it to you by email it's a very powerful one minute nine second video of the doll tests and children's reactions to seeing black dolls and white dolls and expressing preference for those dolls um for example children were asked which doll is nice which doll is smart which doll is well behaved and in most of the cases all the children including the black children went into the white doll with those attributes when they were asked questions like which doll is misbehaved which doll is ugly they pointed to the black uh dolls I encourage you to watch that clip and there are actually much longer versions this this test was repeated um in different languages in different countries and over time and the results remain pretty much the same so um then the following the last few slides talk about structural problems requiring structural solutions and we're going to talk a little bit about that today about how we do policy making um in a way that is genuinely structural in nature and so what I mean by that if I'm looking at the two slides from where we are um looking at the issue of poverty for example we might tell people well you should go to a financial literacy class if you're poor or you should budget more strictly or you should just work more jobs work as many jobs as you have to to be not poor why do you have an iphone don't buy expensive clothes those are individual solutions but poverty itself is the result of systems that we have in place in this country and so I can find individual workarounds like buying cheap and often unhealthy foods or more strict budgeting or denying myself things that others consider standard um or we can have more structural solutions like allocating costs and taxes more fairly or setting and enforcing fair wages etc so that's the recap of what you've already seen now let's talk about some fresh stuff I want to talk a little bit and I'm on slide 17 I want to talk a little bit about the historical context for where we are we started out imagine the world minding its own business when suddenly white people white people happened and through an incredibly wild system of occupation and in many places slavery we ended up creating systems in various countries around the world especially the united states where our very institution were tainted by racism right in housing we look at things like redline social pressure neighborhood amenities right which neighborhoods get investments which neighborhoods are divested from we look at health look at eugenics particularly here in ramon's where abenaki women were being sterilized into the 1970s or the tuskegee experiments substance use the way that we treated the crack epidemic of the 80s and the opioid epidemic of now where 80 percent of its victims are white and we treat it with compassion mental health services wraparound services as opposed to the crime and punishment approach that was taken in the 80s when it when the perception was that more black people were being impacted by the crack epidemic we look at education right discipline rates advancement rates segregation and zoning and the impact that those two things have on how well resourced a school might be and then of course law and civics we look at things like voter suppression disenfranchisement right i always think of the example of when the reconstruction amendment well when the reconstruction amendments were passed and newly emancipated people were given the right to vote a lot of states said well the hell they are and created state level legislation to prevent them from voting doing things like creating felon disenfranchisement and then recategorizing crimes as felonies to ensure that they were ensnaring black people for example and this is documented state legislatures here's the thing here's the thing about people in power especially white people in power in history they love documenting everything everything they do and because they don't see discrimination as a bad thing they weren't shy about documenting it because they thought that they were just doing what was normal and so you can find historical record of legislative meeting and and and debates where people are saying at different states how can we stop the negro from voting well let's create felon disenfranchisement what are the crimes that black people are more commonly associated with well things like wife beating and loitering because of course you were standing around because nobody wanted to hire you because we're black and everybody was racist right and so they made loitering and wife beating felonies but crimes that were more commonly and that's not to say that black people did those things more but that's just what they were more commonly convicted of and then crimes that had a higher conviction rate for white people things like murder arson robbery those were reclassified so that you wouldn't lose your right to vote because they weren't felonies so in alabama there uh the author of their disenfranchisement statue actually boasted that we would eliminate at least what would be say 60 of the negro vote you ended up with a system where you could lose your vote for beating your wife but not for killing her so this was the manipulation of the legal system in order to perpetuate a system of racism so that's kind of that circle area that we're looking at is where we have been for a long time and the continuation of it but we're at a point now at the end of this where we have an opportunity to correct it and there are a number of things that we can do to correct it now i'm going to yeah so let's move to the next slide and i want to talk a little bit about physical segregation because where we live impacts how we live and whether we live at all so let's talk a little bit about place and when we talk about place in vermont we cannot talk about it without acknowledging that the land we call vermont today remains unseated indigenous territory and that's really important because as we think about the cannabis industry you have to think about it in the context of growing right we have a lot of growers in the state and a lot of potential growers in the state and that has to do with land and land is a tricky thing so our next slide is going to show you a map of manchester new hansher and um and this is going to show you a little bit about how they redline manchester now for those who don't know on the column redlining was a practice where we forced physical segregation through the h o l c which was a loan company coalition of banks and this was government sanction where they effectively took neighborhoods of major metropolitan areas around the country and graded them based largely on features that existed like if there was a processing plant or a river nearby but mostly based on who lived there so what you'll see is that for manchester new hansher area d6 is rated as the least desirable because quote belgians the scourge of belgians was enough to make it so that if you wanted to buy a home in area d6 if you were a white person they probably wouldn't let you buy the home there because they figured you deserve better and you shouldn't live in that area conversely if you were a person of color and wanted to buy a home in one of the more well graded areas even if you could afford it they wouldn't give you the loan because you would end up downgrading that neighborhood the presence of one family of color was enough to shift down an area and our next slide is going to illustrate something similar to that what we're looking at on the next slide is boston and you will see that there are two areas that are downgraded one of them is knocked down from best to one down below that because of quote threatening jewish infiltration into the area and these are the actual these are the actual maps with the actual codes from the holc so these aren't my words or anyone else's this is what was being used and government sanctioned in 30s you'll see area d7 area becomes less desirable north of dover street with orientals concentrated in this spot so i've shown you boston i've shown you manchester you may be saying and yeah but where's vermont there are no holc maps for vermont that show red lining but vermont absolutely had a system of restrictive deed covenants and those are still evident today we have historical record that show us that there were restrictions in the conveyance of property where people would put in clauses that said you can't sell this to a french canadian or a black person or an indigenous person so this happened in vermont and the impact that it has today is still very very deeply felt in fact if you take a red lined map from the 30s and overlay it with a map of inequity today they will light up in the same spots why because residential patterns have not tended to change dramatically say for a couple of instances like great migration etc now we have a lot of internally displaced people because of climate emergencies but for the most part we tend to inherit property from our parents we tend to live in places that are close to where we grew up or we return to those places eventually and so residential patterns have not changed over the decades that dramatically which means that when you start off by physically segregating people it is much more difficult to integrate after that we tend to sell to or buy from people who can afford what we can afford people who look like we do right and so when you think about who owns land who owns property and who therefore has exclusive rights over that property it's really important that we keep in mind that as we are building up an industry that is going to require growing space and land the distribution of that land is already starting off from an inequitable place because who is permitted to buy land who can afford to buy land and who can afford to work that land for profit to be able to sustain themselves and their families has already been tainted from decades ago in fact really really from centuries ago so that is sort of some of the foundation of how where we live impacts how we live and therefore what are the opportunities available to us i'm going to go through the next few slides pretty quickly the next slide shows us vermont's population pyramid which is the age and sex distribution of the state population so on the left you're looking at the female population in vermont for 2010 and 2018 on the right you're looking at the male population for vermont and it's stratified by age so the bars that are at the bottom represent the zero to five five to nine ten to fourteen uh age ranges and at the top we're looking at 85 plus 80 to 84 75 to 79 right so older folks are at the top younger folks are at the bottom left is female right is male and we use these in demography a lot um and and and what they're good for so many things but one of the things is they help us to plan for the future for example if you're looking at a given society and they have a population pyramid that's really bottom heavy that is to say you have more young people then what that tells us is that by the time they move up into the middle categories right by the time they move up into those middle ages you better make sure you've got jobs for them because you're going to have a lot of jobless people and jobless people start armed in directions sort of i'm being facetious but i'm just saying um you want to be able to plan for that future or conversely if you have a large middle band and say the middle age folks um and a very narrow band at the younger ages well what that tells you is that you may have a problem because as everyone moves up into the next category up you're going to have a very large senior population who tend to be more often than not not working they tend to be retired um and if you have a smaller number of people in the working age population you can look at your population pyramid and predict you're going to have fewer people supporting an economy that is designed to support a large non-working population so that's what we use population pyramids for and what we're looking at for the Vermont one it shows that we have a very large middle age population i'm looking at sort of like 40 years old to about 70 and then we've got a very large population between 15 and 24 and everything else is kind of smaller now what's that 15 to 24 cluster about well Vermont attracts a lot of students who are college age so you get an influx of people coming to Vermont for college but then as you can see it shrinks at the next age band which tells us they're leaving and so one of the things we have to ask ourselves is how are we retaining and attracting young people and getting them to stay beyond their college years it also shows us that we have an aging population um we know that Vermont's birth rate is if not the first then it is the second lowest in the country as a matter of fact our next slide will help to illustrate that this is a a chart a graph that shows the how many women under 15 as a share of the population i know it sounds really strange to say women under 15 this is just how it's described in economics i can't count don't ask me why um but what this the reason that we look at this metric specifically is because the share of female identified people under 15 is actually a an indicator of future growth for a given place and so if you rank the US state you can see that Vermont is pretty much last in terms of women under 15 as a share of the population not a great indicator for us in terms of economic growth in the future now we know Vermont is the second oldest state in the nation and we know it is the second whitest state in the nation number one in both of those categories goes to Maine who interestingly uh one of their high ranking leaders recently said they don't think racial equity is a problem in Maine even though they are the whitest state in the nation and don't seem to want to ask themselves why but we in Vermont are a little bit more introspective than that we ask ourselves why are we the second whitest state in the nation and there's a lot of reasons for it but what i wanted to highlight here is that even though we are the second highest median age and the second least diverse state the penultimate state that was an expensive word that i thought i would deploy here even though we have those two data points they don't tell the full story because when you break that down by racial group and our next slide will show this you find that the median age for white Vermonters and for indigenous Vermonters is in the mid 40s and late 40s respectively but for all other vermoners of colors it of color it is in the 20s which confirms to us what we already know at the national level which is that millennial and gen z cohorts are the two most racially diverse in the nation's history in vermont people of color skew younger and so what that means is as the board is thinking about racial equity and other forms of equity in its decision making and deliberations we also have to be pairing those racial equity efforts with generational equity efforts right because more of our communities of color in vermont are younger than they are older and so the set of challenges facing my generation and the generation beyond me or after me include things like massive student loan debt include things like having little or no experience in the workforce right again we have an aging population here which and and we have a population nationally that is staying in the workplace longer right so that means that opportunities for younger people tend to be a little bit more sparse especially when it comes to things like promotional path and obtaining seniority so when we think about racial equity in cannabis industry in vermont we also have to recognize the intersectional issues of age of poverty socioeconomics right those who may not necessarily have land or property but who still want to be part of an industry that is opening up a market that is opening up our next slide is going to overwhelm you visually but it shows you a number of statistics that show the landscape of racial inequity in vermont for example on our next slide you'll see that people of color in vermont are six excuse me no black people in vermont specifically are six times more likely to be arrested for misdemeanor possession of marijuana than their white counterparts even though data have shown us time and time again that usage and possession rates between black americans and white americans are not different we see from this colorful statistics slide that indigenous vermonters are diagnosed with depression more often than white vermonters and have less access to health services to be able to treat these conditions we know that the home ownership rate is extremely disparate in 2015 it was 72 percent for white vermonters and 48 percent for vermonters of color i think the burlington mayor recently shared a statistic that out of all of the home the thousands of homes i think six thousand owned in burlington only 17 are owned by black people in burlington in the part of the state where black americans are most concentrated we know that if we had had wage equity in the state that is to say we paid people the same for the same work the statewide economy on the whole would have been 0.42 billion with a b dollars larger which benefits absolutely everybody not just communities of color we know that the state needs to step its game up as well when it comes to hiring we had in fiscal 19 we had 20 or 12 percent of our applicants were applicants of color and yet we only hired six percent people of color paid them less on average lost them at higher rate than we lost white employees um and we people of color in vermont state service tend to be underrepresented in managerial and supervisory positions we know that people of color specifically black americans often do not visit national parks because they don't feel safe in them i promise you you will never see me on a hike alone in vermont not going to do that we know that hate crimes are on the rise and we know that data collection even with these numbers that we do have there's still so much that we don't know now our next slide um is going to talk a little bit about how we frame the issues so much of present day inequity has to do with historical action and well i guess it depends on how far back we want to go to acknowledge that harm what you're looking at is a snippet from an article where former new york city mayor bloomberg um says that we wouldn't have had the 2008 crisis if we hadn't stopped redlining he says and at the point that i want to highlight here is where he says uh congress got involved local elected officials as well and said oh that's not fair these people should be able to get credit and once you started pushing in that direction banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn't as good as you would like now first of all former mayor it wasn't as good as you would like because of all of the systemic inequities that led to wage gaps um differences in the accumulation and the passing down of intergenerational wealth for myriad reasons the credit wasn't quote as good as you would like and i also want to put in a plug for people in my age cohort to remind the world that credit scores didn't exist until 1989 we are the guinea pig generation for that so thanks a lot but also the idea that stopping a racist program like redlining could be blamed for a financial crisis down the line a financial crisis which by the way resulted in bailouts of those same entities says a lot about how people see racism and systemic oppression as integral to the maintenance of our systems let me say that more clearly this is a prominent public official who is basically saying we had a financial collapse because we stopped doing a racist thing now if the very structure of your society if your very economy is so firmly planted on racism that removing a racist practice and again we removed redlining on paper but it still happens right but if if if your economy is built on that so much so that being not racist collapses it then what does that say about our system if stopping discrimination collapses the whole thing now that leads me to our next slide and our next concept which is intent and impact this slide describes two studies i'll describe them to you because i think this font is kind of small um one of them is a study that was conducted it's called the sting of intentional pain and what they did was they had participants receiving electric shocks now some of the participants were told that they were being administered by accident it was a technical malfunction we're so sorry you're getting shocked we're trying to fix it but they were told it was accidental the other participants were told that those shocks were being administered intentionally by somebody in another room and what was discovered was that the participants rated their now the shocks were of the same strength but the participants rated their pain higher when they thought it was being done intentionally now on the right is the description of another study it's called intentional harms are worse even when they're not this one's a little more complicated let me set it up for you uh you had participants in this study and they were give they were told that there was a company that made some bad investments and as a result of those bad investments a bunch of employees lost a certain amount of money half of the participants were told that the ceo made those bad investments by accident he thought they were a sure thing they weren't it was accidental the other half of the participants were told he made those bad investments on purpose because he knew they would fail and he wanted to incentivize the employees to work harder by causing them to lose their money and it was the same amount of money that the employees lost in both cases but the participants were told different things now even though the two groups were told that the employees lost the same amount of money the people who were told that the bad investments were done on purpose they rated the employee they rated that loss as more damaging to employees and their families than the then the participants who thought that it was unintentional in other words things that cause harm cause a greater perception and experience of harm when we believe they're being done intentionally or with bad intentions and that's really important because it blends two concepts that are closely linked in government next slide please in the in 2012 the federal government created a standard that said hey you know what sometimes we make a law or a rule and it ends up we don't intend for it to have a disparate impact but it ends up having a disparate impact and so the federal government in 2012 said where that is the case the rule should not stand it is creating the impact standard um the previous previous to now um presidential administration proposed to remove that rule basically wanting to say we don't really care if it has a disparate impact if we can plausibly argue that we didn't intend for that then we don't have to do anything about the rule now that ended up not being the case we still have the impact standard but what this and the previous slide tell us is that it's not just about whether we intended to do something in a way that was facially neutral it's also about whether it had the desired impact and if it has a discriminatory impact then we have an ethical and in some cases a legal responsibility to do something about it and I really love this quote from Sherilyn Eiffel at the end of the NAACP legal defense fund who says at its worst the intent standard reflects the comforting belief among too many that discrimination is perpetuated by villainous characters who use racial slurs or at the very least the view that discrimination should only be deemed illegal if it emanates from the evil hearts and minds of perpetrators more importantly the effect standard of the impact standard reflects a recognition that acts that perpetuate discrimination are not cleansed simply by benign intentions now what does that mean for us well we have many many examples throughout history in this country of policies that appeared racially neutral on their face but in fact had very disparate impacts for example our next slide talks about the new deal we know that the new deal brought with it a lot of great things including worker protections collective bargaining 40-hour work week but it deliberately excluded domestic workers and agricultural workers now on its face that appears race neutral right anybody can be a domestic worker or an agricultural worker but at the time remember this is 1935 at the time most domestic and agricultural workers were black people and so by a by excluding those specific professions we have effectively cut out a large swath the population based on race we have another one on our next slide in alabama again right following reconstruction a lot of states were worried that now that we had to let black people in our schools imagine the horror that or rather actually that's not even that's not even true now that we had to provide proper educational facilities right we couldn't discriminate we ended up with a lot of states that said they're gonna raise our taxes to adequately fund so-called black schools that we have been underfunding for years and so a lot of states rushed to change their constitutions so that they would limit the amount by which they could have their property taxes raised alabama is one such state so basically they tried to protect white property owners by saying you can only raise taxes by this amount because they knew that they were going to have to end up properly funding schools that were attended by non-white people it's 140 years later that property tax cap is still on the books and because of it alabama's property tax revenue as a share of its economy is the lowest of any state in the country and every single student including the white students are feeling the brunt of that because the education tax is or because the education system is not necessarily funded at the level that it should be why because 140 years ago a bunch of racist people didn't want to have to do it so this is an example of how racist policy making that appears race neutral on its face ends up having cumulative and damaging effects for absolutely everybody hundreds of years down the line did you know i want to go back to the domestic and agricultural workers um have you ever thought about the fact that we tip wait staff in restaurants we don't tip flight attendants but they're kind of like wait staff in the sky and as a matter of fact they actually do even more for us because they also keep us safe right why don't we tip airline workers well uh at the time that commercial flying was first made available to the public we needed people people were scared of flying right you're hurtling at 500 round miles per hour in a metal tube that's scary and so in order to inspire confidence in flying we needed people on the staff in planes who could inspire confidence and of course who inspires confidence in america more than white men right so all flight attendants at the time were white men now this is also a time in the nation's history when it was considered an insult to tip a white man because it implied that he needed your charity that he was beneath you so in this country we did not tip white men for that reason and because all flight attendants were white men we didn't tip flight attendants now the profession of flight attendant has diversified with age sex race ethnicity ability since then but that vestige of not tipping for that profession has remained and so today we might say that that's a practice that's race neutral but it's not because it emanated from a very very racialized place of not tipping white men even though the profession looks different today so i want to go with one more case this is currently good law on our next slide uh eoc versus catastrophe management solutions this is currently good law that says you are allowed to withhold or rescind a job offer if the person wears his or her hair in locks you might know them as dreadlocks which comes from the term dreaded locks there's nothing dreaded about our hair so we try not to say dreadlocks we wear your hair in locks apparently you can legally say we don't want you to work for us because the court deemed that racially neutral because anybody can wear their hair in locks now what this does is ignores the cultural and in some cases spiritual relevance and importance of locks for a lot of people's culture by saying it's race neutral because anybody can wear their hair in locks really is a slap in the face to all of the students that we keep reading about being forced to cut their hair for sporting events people being denied employment because they have locks and are brown when we have other people who may wear their hair in locks but also have other social privileges that might overcome the fact that they wear their hair in locks so this is currently good law and it's considered race neutral but as we know it's going to have a disparate impact based on race next slide here's another one workplace injury claims tend to be brought by white males more often than not workplace harassment claims tend to be brought more often by people of color people living with disabilities and people identified as women and if you could just hit next twice on this one if you are bringing a if you receive a settlement in a workplace harassment case you are taxed on that settlement if you receive a settlement and a workplace injury claim you are not taxed on that settlement here's someone we know that there's a lot of disparity in terms of educational attainment and the impact that it has on wages for example on our next slide you'll see that it will take an african-american woman who has a master's degree will still statistically make seven dollars an hour less than a white man with a bachelor's we know that latina and indigenous women need to attain at least a master's degree before they begin to surpass the wages of a white man with a high school diploma and we know that asian-american people in the united states are least likely to be promoted because of stereo to management positions because of stereotypes that they're quiet meek and anti-social right i talk a lot about equal payday for women in the united states um which is the day into the current year that a woman would need to have worked to earn the same as a white man for the same work from the previous year so in other words if i and another a white man of the same profession started working same day january first 2020 that white man is going to earn a certain salary by december 31 in order statistically for me to earn that same salary i as a latina person need to work until october 21 of this year to catch up to his december 2020 so these are the ways that now now nobody is saying here's your master's oh you're black okay wait no this is your master right no one's saying that that's not explicit by race but when you look at the broader landscape it becomes very clear that race neutrality is not easy to accomplish in policy making and in outcomes so where does that bring us structural problems require structural solutions not individual ones and we talked a little bit about that in our recap earlier um if we could advance by two what we what i hope the board will um take on in its work is yes looking at things like fiscal impact and yes looking at things like operational impact but also looking at equity impact of our policy work right and remand with cannabis taxation and regulation this is particularly tricky because timing is everything we know for a fact that when we open an application for economic development programs oftentimes the first people in line are the people who either had insider information reman is a small community after all or people who speak english who have higher educational attainment who can understand the legal and regulatory process people who may have already been in the business sector and people who have the startup capital to be able to do this and i'm thinking about my home state new york um my other home because vermont is my home state now my other home state new york where they told us yeah yeah we're going to do medical marijuana and it's going to be great and you're going to be able to be a company and the application first of all they only had five spots open for dispensaries and they had to be vertically integrated so you had to be able to do the process from beginning to end and here was the kicker the non refundable application fee was 250 000 so you could not even apply just so that you could get denied unless you had a quarter million to waste on an application for a vertically integrated medical program with only five slots and if you know anything about albany i'm willing to bet that those slots had been allocated before the application for it even opened so when we think about the equity impact we have to take into account where people are and why people are there it's not enough to say that latino asian indigenous and black people just have less money but there's a reason for that and that reason is structural discrimination right it's not enough to say well you don't have a house but i do because my great great grandfather worked really hard well i mean that's beautiful yeah but he was permitted to work really hard and he was actually paid fairly for his hard work someone else's great great grandfather was forced to work hard and was paid nothing i want to talk a little bit about some of the ways that the board could apply an equity lens to its work our next slide shows an image of the state of ramon equity impact assessment tool this is a tool that we use at the executive agencies now to accompany all budget and policy proposals now effectively what this is is a questionnaire that is required before the governor's office will green light a budget or policy proposal and this questionnaire requires the proposal champion to um ask themselves certain certain questions to make sure that the proposal is centering equity and not creating um unintended disparities for example this tool asks for any data that you may have relied on in in coming up with this proposal are you issuing public-facing documents if so are those documents going to be translated into ramon's 10 most commonly spoken languages if not why not it asks is it's going to have a disparate impact on any demographic groups um and and you know this this form yes was designed um technically for racial equity but i just can't help myself and it's actually worded quite vaguely so that it can be used for equity for the lgbt qia plus population people living with disabilities people experiencing poverty or homelessness right so it's very broadly applicable and so the point of this form is that we should not be advancing any proposals that are going to create exacerbate or ignore disparities so i'm really happy to follow up with the board on this form and to send you over some accompanying materials that we've developed to um to help folks go through it um i'm going to close with an image and a quote our next slide shows um illinois i i this is a photo from the chicago cannabis lottery when they opened up their market and if you can see who's in the room and it's hard to do that one because you're looking at the backs of heads and two because it's hard to impute racial identity without really knowing but if you could wager a guess as to the racial composition of this room it's not looking like they're getting started on on on a great foot here this is the lottery line in chicago and this is the kind of thing that we're hoping to avoid in remand early access equals early success and so how we set this up is everything remember timing is important our next slide shows a quote that i always like it's from kurtis augdon he's over at the interaction institute he says the work for racial equity is about undoing as much as it is about doing we do not simply build new culture or behavior on top of old especially in situations that are characterized by depression some things must be released and this letting go does not come easy and i share this with you because so often when we think about equity measures and equity initiatives we're thinking about what new good things can we do what new policies or strategies can we implement and that's good but it's also about looking at what systems exist now and reforming or removing those if they're creating inequity and that's really important so as the board continues its work and its deliberations i would just encourage us not just to look toward what new things we can implement in the future but also what are the social educational infrastructural and public safety and other things that exist what are the landscapes in those areas that exist now that need to change in order to move forward equitably in this new market last i just want to give you a preview of what our next session together is going to look like whenever that is next time i hope that the board that we can talk a little bit about messaging biased language the role that media has played in stereotyping and in misinformation and that's really important again because in in the ccb's work we're not just talking about the legal landscape of navigating a new market or a newly legal market we're talking about the social and socio-psychological changes that need to happen remember we have a population of people who were around during airliftman and nixon's war on drugs and we're going to have to for lack of a better word we educate ourselves about the lies we were told and things we were made to believe and then how a little bit about how to engage in dialogue with others so that's what i'm hoping we can cover in our next session i know i'm over time but i am very very available to you for as long as you're able to to stay for any questions or feedback you have thank you so much for your time duzana i'm just so grateful for you to do this i know your work can be exhausting and going to doing this for every we're not the only people that you're talking to about these issues and just so grateful for you to be here today and your commitment to continue to work with us i think the next agenda items look great um i i i do have a few questions um and again i know we're over time but we are just we we have a break scheduled so i so if you're okay i might just ask you a few questions and see if kyle and julie have some as well um my first it really goes to implicit bias which are part of your primer slides um you know i like the kind of explanation that these are mental shortcuts these implicit biases that we have that our brain kind of makes and of course as we make more and more decisions these implicit biases become deeper and deeper rooted and entrenched um and because they have a compounding effect um how can we as a board be vigilant about identifying them in our own decision making and kind of short-circ getting or rewiring them so that we're not um so we're not kind of just kind of acting on a subconscious level that might be entrenching further entrenching some of these inequities that have been kind of built into our lives through our experiences yeah definitely there are a few ways to do that number one again i encourage use of the equity impact assessment tool because it's going to help you ask yourself some of the right questions that we should be asking ourselves sometimes we take things as given um and so having to go through the process of actually responding to a question about it helps us to unpack it i'll give one really fast example of a time this state did not use an eia and created a racial disparity when the legislature passed tobacco 21 legislation it did not create a car of a religious exemption um which is a problem for the abanaki community tobacco was considered a sacred plant and so right now people under 21 cannot even possess it which is a part of rituals for conveyance of prayers and purification if we had had a religious carve out similar to um church wine for people who take communion then we wouldn't have created a racial disparity for the month indigenous people so um doing an eia would have surfaced that disparity and we would have been able to craft that legislation in a way that didn't create a racial disparity so one is use of the tool the second thing that i would recommend is composition of the board is going to be really important right sometimes implicit bias can be mitigated just by having more people in the room who don't necessarily share those biases or those perspectives so to the extent possible your representation should be more broadly diverse um absent that or perhaps in conjunction with that hearing from people with lived experience is going to be absolutely crucial right so sometimes you might create a policy or an idea that is shaped by your own implicit bias but running it past others and i don't just mean other policy heads right don't just like find another brown person who thinks exactly the same as you think and say we're good right we're good um but running past a lot of people people who are new to the state people who have been here for a long time members of the community people with different educational attainments right get as broad a showing as possible because everyone's going to be impacted by this even if you're just somebody who lives in a town near a dispensary everybody in vermont is going to be impacted by this um the fourth thing that i would do is look to other jurisdictions that have been explicit about equity in their work right so i'm thinking about illinois even california their cannabis programs have been very explicitly focused on equity and so looking from those other jurisdictions is also really helpful to helping us recognize things that we may not have seen another thing i might ask um you to consider is to think about people who have been in the illicit market already what would it take for them to be able to confidently legally and effectively participate in a legal market because these are the pros right whether or not it was legal these are the pros and so these are people who often have had to jump through incredible hoops to operate in an environment that where this was not legal before these are people who know the industry and the market and so they shouldn't be um so that i i would think that seeking their opinions is also super important and you are necessarily going to capture um historically marginalized people in that cohort now the problem is getting them to trust you but that's just a trust building thing that's going to take a lot of time so those are just some of the strategies that i would say to overcoming implicit bias and then again doing regular introspective work training yourselves often asking yourselves are we on the right path who have we not heard from yet thank you i have some follow-up questions but i may just turn it over to julie and kyle just if they if they want to jump in i i have a couple questions and and on the last thing that you said she said i was wondering could we potentially use vermont's network of cjc's for work like that to to people who have been previously convicted that may have gone through a cjc program and used that network to sort of bring people in or at least to get their thoughts and opinions and build trust i would say yes um i would say yes and i would also say that we should we should lean on those more formal structures and also allow ourselves to step out of that and to to look to the informal networks as well right um it should be a combination of both and i think that in in the case of the ccb's work it's different from other um other sectors or industries in that credibility doesn't have to come from credentials and credibility doesn't have to come from people with long cvs right this is an industry that has so many complicated social implications and so for that reason yes let's use the cjc but let's also not just rely on them or on the sort of formal state-sanctioned structures for that guidance okay i think my other question was going to be also about structures like do we have this does the state of vermont have employer resource groups and is that a group that we should be bringing in to collaborate with so the state does have a number of programs and i think um and i'm still learning there's there's so much to learn about the economic development and accd but my understanding is that the state does have programs but they are often these services are often contracted out to other parties so accd is not necessarily directly doing that ta but we we contract with organizations who do it so i think the answer is yes um i don't know how many of those employer resource programs are well suited for this industry or for the demographic we want to attract and retain in the industry i think i was thinking more about does does the state of vermont have employee resource groups within the state you know or affinity groups they're sometimes called do do we have yes sorry i thought you said employer um actually we do have a couple we have a few already and we have a proposal in the queue to have a more formal structure that not only structures it but that also encourages it so the answer is yes we have some and we want more and we're working on how to make that more fun okay great thank you thank you so much juzana i'm just going to ask one question and and then a more procedural follow-up question so i i'm in 100 agreement with you that that folks in the vermont cannabis community that have been participating in the illicit market are the experts here and it's going to take some time to build that truss through our actions through our words and and and time and i know i'm really excited to be working with you on a lot of different facets of how this program is going to come together i've been thinking a lot about social equity applicants as we're looking at s25 and what's included there and looking at vermont's demographics i mean you know the demographics are what they are and i'm sure you've thought a lot about what a social equity applicant might look like beyond just somebody's racial makeup in the state of vermont and i was wondering just for for folks and this is going to be a continuing conversation i certainly understand that but but i'm wondering what your thoughts are on what makes a social equity applicant um in the state of vermont yeah so i guess first i i just have to say that i my dream is i long for the day when we don't have social equity applicant at all and everyone is just an applicant with equal standing in a fair shot um for now as we think about what a social equity applicant could look like i think the obvious um the obvious consideration is something like race or ethnicity but there are so many identities and so many circumstances that um that really warrant consideration so yes race and ethnicity and not just for people including multiracial multicultural people is going to be really important in that and so how we define race and ethnicity and how we let people self identify is important are there going to be people who take advantage of that yeah absolutely i'm aware of people who uh just check off the box that say yes i'm an mwbe when they're not i am aware of people who put businesses in their wives names to say that it's a women-owned business so there's always that possibility and perhaps there are mechanisms to sort of account for that but um overall i would say race ethnicity sex gender identity and expression membership in the lgbtqa plus population people living with disabilities and people experiencing poverty um etc people perhaps and and then i mean it really depends on how broad you want to go right for example we haven't historically considered people um with low uh low or no academic attainment as a historically marginalized group but maybe we should right um so i really think it just matters how much we know who are the folks in society who tend to be prized and privileged and dominant and then there's the rest of us but really it's just a question of how many of the rest of us do you want to include and those are some categories but i mean i know that there are probably people on this call right now who are shouting at me through their screens saying you forgot about x group yeah totally and i'm i'm so happy to um listen to your expertise in and all these issues you know and i think everybody on this call likely knows that you know if you even if you were um someone in their young adult days who got arrested for a marijuana charge that can stick with you and it can help or it can detract from getting a job offer or you know financing um a car or a house or whatever these these examples extrapolate out depending on you know what has happened in your background and trying to to work backwards from there is um it's a herculean herculean task um i i'm i'm so excited to be um working with you moving forward the only other the only other thing i wanted to ask is your presentation was amazing there was so much great information there i know that some folks are on the phone and may not have been able to view your presentation this is this is going to be recorded and so folks will be able to view our entire meeting and view that presentation but i didn't know if this presentation lived elsewhere um in the state of vermont system that folks can can more readily access that presentation or slide deck and if if maybe that's not the case if maybe you wouldn't mind forwarding nelly and the board um you know a presentation that makes sense from your end for us to put up on our website to make sure that these issues are are not forgotten and they're highlighted yeah coming soon to a theater near you uh the state of vermont racial equity website is going to have a toolkit that will include a bunch of slide decks so we've sort of been amassing all of these resources over time and when it felt like we have critical mass we're just going to dump them on the racial equity website so the answer to your question is it doesn't currently exist it will exist in the near future and in the interim yes i will send over the slides for you to post great thank you so much i've got i've got one follow-up question if you don't mind sticking around it might be a can of worms and you can always you can always punt until next next time we meet um but um you know something piggybacking on something you said uh just that i've often heard that equity programs in the in the cannabis world um and we'll just limit it to the cannabis world um are pathways to equality um that's the goal is to kind of the equity is a pathway to equality and i just wonder if you have any sort of initial thoughts about what equality in this industry would look like is it is it all about just license whole license ownership or are there other metrics that we can kind of strive for or mindsets that we can adopt that would kind of be a more egalitarian equality based system yeah i i i don't think i want to touch the equality piece because i don't know that i agree with with that i don't know if equality is a goal it's it's a strategy right but equity and equality aren't the same and i think our goal should be equity so i think equity in cannabis should be a pathway to equity in cannabis um but i'm sure there's someone else out there who is astute who can articulate it well for me in a way that i can understand but i'll leave that part as it is but in terms of what should be a goal is it licensure is it something else is a combination um you know again i just keep going back to what our our overall definition of equity is which is where if we're talking about race or equity where your race or your ethnicity is not a predictor of your outcomes and so for us the goal should be whether we're looking at licensure land access um dispensary access consumer outcomes any part of the sector i should be able to not predict the patterns based on race or ethnicity or any other immutable factor um so that's going to include licensure it's going to include all the other things and you know in vermont again it's tricky right most of the land is held by not that many people and um we may not see a lot of people my age in this industry we might but we might not you know why because we're all just working for sally maya here uh in this country so i completely lost my train of thought i think it's a combination of things including licensure but i wouldn't just go by the raw numbers because for example you know we could have a whole bunch of licenses issued to people of color but if those people of color are like i don't know let's pretend a little bit if it's like obama and henry loose gates you know who all have the licenses in vermont then yeah okay we've we've included some black people but have we really moved the needle on oppression and inequity and so yes it's about the numbers but it's also about the measurable social impact and and i think that that's really key yeah and anything that we can do i mean you're under s25 um supposed to help us come up with social equity applicant definition if we could also maybe expand that to kind of see what sort of metrics we can we can use to see you know the social determinant outcomes and those those types of things to see if we've actually been successful um that would be that would be great work for us to do as well um well i i'll leave it there um you know i appreciate the commitment to come back i know that that was been a goal of the board to have ongoing trainings not just these kind of one one-offs so um i really appreciate your commitment there and um i guess for the benefit of all the people watching we're going to take a quick break um where we'll be back at one o'clock um with the training on open meetings laws and public records acts um we are going to go into executive session the purpose of that is to interview candidates for our executive director position and i'll give a brief update on where things stand there before we go into executive session we'll have a public comment period and then you know following our executive session we will be adjourning so if folks don't want to stick around there's not going to be much business done um after our executive session but for now um thank you again thank you uh kyle and julie and nelly if you wouldn't mind just um i just do a a mute all and put up our um a way i guess a way message well i see that it's one o'clock nelly would you mind uh starting the recording all right we're recording okay well welcome back this is our afternoon session of our inaugural meeting of the cannabis control board um our first presenter uh for the afternoon is michelle anderson uh she is the assistant attorney general in charge of the general counsel division at the attorney general's office and she's going to be giving us an overview of open meeting laws and how we as a board should be complying with those and michelle i see you on there um in the in the participants list i think nelly um has attempted to give you screen sharing ability if you could try that out i know you have a presentation for us um and if there's any problems we'll try and work around them uh let me let me give that a try okay it looks like it worked on my end you've got the slideshow up i see it awesome okay all right then um i'll go ahead and get started uh good afternoon everyone as uh i said i'm michelle anderson i'm the chief of the general counsel and administrative law division at the ag's office and our division handles a lot of public records complaints that come in so i've learned a lot about it over the last few years um i'll be briefly discussing uh vermont's open meeting law on a pretty basic level today so in deference to those of you who have little or no experience in the area but please feel free to ask questions and those of you with experience will hopefully help me out with any comments or observations that you've had um also to avoid a charge of plagiarism i'll admit up front that most of this material was taken directly from the secretary of state's excellence guide to open meetings which is on the secretary of state website and i highly recommend you use it as a resource as you carry out your work so um as said i'll be sharing my screen with you um i'm not sure i'll be able to see a raised hand function given that so please just shout out if you have a question or a comment well thanks yep please bear with me as i try to navigate my notes and these slides so to begin with the open meeting law can be found at 1 vsa 3 10 through 3 14 essentially it requires that all meetings of public bodies be open to the public unless a specific exemption applies so in a nutshell in order to make a meeting open to the public the public body must provide advanced notice of the meeting including an agenda discuss all business and take all action in open meeting unless an exception applies allow members of the public to attend and participate in the meetings to take uh meeting minutes and make them available to the public um that sounds easy i think but the devil is in the details so i'm going to break this down with um some of the definitions so first of all what is a public body as you can see from this definition the board is a public body subject to the open meeting requirements as are any committees or subcommittees that are formed by the board and this is important because it means that all such committees must also follow the same notice and public participation requirements for their meetings as are applicable to the board as a whole it's been an area of a lot of complaint and confusion at least since i've been here because the terms committee and subcommittee haven't been defined in the law but to be safe you should just consider any group or subgroup of the committee uh to or i'm sorry any subgroup to be a committee that way you make sure all the meetings of any quorum will follow the open meeting law requirements and this could get very confusing and our office or the secretary of state's office could assist you if you have any questions about this a more complicated uh matter is really the definition of meeting a meeting is defined as a gathering of a quorum of the members of a public body for the purpose of discussing the business of the public body or for the purpose of taking action and that is actually pretty simple when we're all sitting in a room together like we used to do in days of yore but uh there's so many ways to meet now that the technology can make things complicated first of all as we see today meetings can take place electronically although in normal times a physical location has to be designated for members of the public and at least one member of the body or a staff member or other designee would also have to be present also any member who participates in a meeting remotely must be able to hear and see throughout the meeting and this means participation by speakerphone or skype or this for example can be appropriate but participation by email would not be and as you know obviously due to the pandemic the legislature made temporary amendments to the open meeting law to allow meetings to take place entirely remotely but public participation and advanced public notice are still required so when meeting electronically the public body has to use technology that permits attendance by the public such as we're using today including if needed by people with disabilities closed captioning and other techniques to allow people with disabilities to participate and the law also says whenever feasible public access must be allowed by telephone i think that's due to the lack of broadband in vermont so information regarding how the public may access the meetings electronically must also be posted and included in each agenda and the law also provides a slight enlargement of time to post meeting minutes from five to ten days so the greater ability to communicate through technology can obviously be really helpful but it can also be dangerous because it can allow meetings to happen or not intended to be meetings so one example is what happens through the use of group emails if a quorum of board members are part of a group email and the business of the of the public body is discussed the discussion may well be considered a meeting even if those involved didn't intend for it to be also because the law seems to allow for a gathering over time successive interrelated private conversations usually done an email about the board's business can start out to include less than a quorum would be tricky in the case of a three-member board here but but if those emails even if they didn't include a quorum were shared or forwarded eventually a quorum may be included and you could find yourself with a meeting so you have to be aware of serial communications as well another area of potential danger is social media so if a quorum of the board is in the same social media group and the business of the board is discussed this could also end up being a meeting even even if none of the members participate or even know the discussions going on because technically they have access to that and finally I'll just give another example with collective on collective editing of documents online so using SharePoint or things like that sometimes various people can can view a document comment on it edit it discuss it kind of online at once and that could also be a meeting under the wrong circumstances so you really have to think critically about all group communications to avoid inadvertently holding a meeting that doesn't comply with the open meeting law the next important definition is a quorum but that's pretty straightforward for this board it's a simple majority of the total members which is two so what constitutes the business of the board and you see this is a really broad definition it includes just about anything that the that involves the board's jurisdiction or control so you should think of it broadly in order to be safe I would in skirt on well this isn't really business error in the definition of or on the consideration that it might be business but the law does carve out some areas that are not considered business or not meetings for the purpose of the open meeting law so some things that would not require open meeting law compliance would be administrative functions this is a pretty large area including things like scheduling a meeting organizing an agenda distributing materials clerical work work assignments basically routine day to day tasks that that don't require decision making or or substantive decision making or appropriate money spent or encumber money and this is another area to be careful of I have seen cases where the public body thinks they're just carrying out administrative function but in fact they're exercising some substantive judgment so it really needs to be purely administrative the body is also not meeting to carry out its business when attending other types of functions as noted on the slide certain gather you know other types of gatherings a convention you're a training press conferences media events the meetings of a different public body and then a couple other specifics that have been defined by law those wouldn't those wouldn't count as being as meetings of the public body for purposes of the open meeting law but all of these exceptions would be for not if the members of the public body stray into discussing business at those events so you have to be aware of the cocktail party conversation that that becomes a discussion about business and just completely avoid that so what notice is required to hold a public meeting and that depends on the type of meeting it is for a regular recurring meeting the public body usually adopts a resolution setting aside the time place and manner of the meeting which must be made available to the public upon request special meetings are meetings that take place at a time outside of the regular meeting and public notice is required at least 24 hours in advance announcing the meeting's time place and purpose to a newspaper or radio station serving the area as well as to any person who's requested in writing to be notified of special meetings and all public bodies must give oral or written notice to each member unless a member has waived this notice so emergency meetings don't need to be noticed except as soon as possible but make sure you're dealing with a true emergency in that case emergency is can be emergency meeting may be held only when necessary to respond to an unforeseen occurrence or condition requiring immediate attention and even then if you can possibly give notice beforehand you should give notice beforehand also a part of notice is the need to post an agenda for public meetings and those agendas need to be posted to a website if you have one 48 hours in advance of the regular meeting and 24 hours in advance of the special meeting the law doesn't really require much to be in an agenda nothing very specific except to require that the agenda designate a physical location although it's discussed this has changed during the pandemic but it's important to note the secretary of state's recommendation that in keeping with the law's intent an agenda should allow interested members of the public to be reasonably informed about what specific topics will be discussed and what actions may be taken at the meeting and if you want to change your agenda after it's been posted it is possible to add or delete an item as the first act of the meeting of the first act of business at the meeting but the secretary of state frowns on this practice for the obvious reason that in such an instance the public really hasn't been informed in advance of what the meeting will be about so they recommend that last-minute agenda items especially those requiring board action be added only at emergency meetings otherwise wait for the next meeting there's also requirement that public bodies take minutes of their meetings which give a true indication of the business of the meeting covering all topics that arise at a minimum the meetings have to include the names of all the members of the public body present the names of all active participants all motions proposals resolutions and their dispositions and the results of votes with a record of individual votes if the roll call is taken and meeting minutes are public records so you have to make them available within five days of the meeting post them to your website if you have one and and keep them for one year so despite all we've discussed about the need for meetings to be open there are instances where the public body can be privately and one of them is when they meet to deliberate in a quasi-judicial proceeding I don't know if that will happen with this board but that would be your exemption if you did far more common though the far more common reason for a private meeting though is executive session and that's to discuss certain topics which require a degree of privacy to enter into an executive session a motion has to be made in open session that indicates the reason for doing so for a state body a two-thirds affirmative vote is required to carry that motion and the only permissible reasons for entering an executive session are specifically set forth in the statute in 313 in two categories the first category of topics could only be discussed in an executive session after a finding that premature general public knowledge would clearly place the public body or the person involved at a substantial substantial disadvantage and this category includes contracts labor relations agreements with employees arbitration and mediation grievances other than tax grievances pending probable civil litigation and confidential attorney client communications and then there are some topics which may be discussed in executive session without making that finding of substantial disadvantage those include real estate purchases releases certain types of personnel actions provided that the public body makes the final hiring or appointment decision and explains its reason in an open meeting also you could have an executive session without declaring or without finding the substantial disadvantage whether it's a clear and imminent peril to public safety discussions of exempt records under Vermont's public records acts and security or emergency response measures if the disclosure could jeopardize public safety another fun executive session facts include the fact that you can invite others to an executive session as needed such as legal counsel staff clerical assistance and persons who are subjects of the discussion or whose information will be needed for the discussion but keep in mind even though you can discuss certain matters in executive session you still have to take your formal action on those matters in open session except for when securing a real estate purchase so if you inadvertently violate the law how does the public body cure the violation and essentially you do it by holding a meeting that was properly noticed I'm sorry if you inadvertently hold a meeting or violate the law by holding a meeting that was not properly noticed or wrongfully excluded members of the public or you held an executive session that shouldn't been in the executive session you could cure it within 14 days by either ratifying the action in an open meeting or declaring void any action that was taken there's a lot of case law around this so if if you suspect you've violated the law in this area that's a good time to consult with our office or the secretary state's office to figure out how to cure this the point of the law is it to penalize people for every technical violation but to give a ability to cure when when such things happen and specifically the public body would have to adopt measures to prevent future violations and I've seen this happen a lot with training the board will agree to training or other process changes that will would not allow that to happen yet and so hopefully you never need to know this but there are criminal penalties for those who intentionally violate the open meeting law it's a misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $500 and members of the public or the attorney general can bring an enforcement action asking according to grant injunctive relief declaratory judgment or award attorney's fees in the case of a knowing violation so I know that was a very quick overview but I'm happy to take questions if you have them or you can submit them to me later and I'm happy to look them over later as well given the time maybe we should submit questions to you however I do have one and maybe you can answer it very briefly and so we fully intend as a board to adopt a regular meeting schedule and it'll probably be weekly meetings of the board and weekly meetings of our subcommittees of our advisory panel until we're waiting to do that until we have our executive director in place and until we've had some time to discuss you know how to maximize participation but until we adopt a resolution on a regular meeting schedule are we technically holding special meetings and even if we announce them at our current meetings you know is that and are we following a different set of the special meeting rules you'd be safer to go ahead and just treat it as special meetings if it's not going to be too long especially just follow those guidelines the 24 hours and notifying the right parties posted up to your website because I don't think they will be regular until you adopt until you adopt that schedule so I think that's a safer course okay um Kyle Julie I mean we were a little bit over time with Michelle but if you if you have any quick questions that might be answered now otherwise we can submit questions to Michelle in writing one so in the before times when we had to have at least one person in a in a room when we had a remote when the other members were remote and we now have some exceptions to that those exceptions end when the executive order when the when that lifts right is that correct I'm expecting to maybe see some tweaks though yeah because of such a great acknowledgement of virtual meetings has really been helpful to lots of people yeah thank you I'll let you go Michelle thank you so much and look forward to writing some written questions for you anytime thank you thank you so our next item on the agenda is to do a public records act training with charity Clark who's the chief of staff for the attorney general um Nellie is uh is charity here uh she is and she's also a presenter so she should be able to screen share if she needs to great okay well charity I'll turn it over to you if you're having any technical issues um you know hopefully you're not but we could probably try and work around them okay if I talk can you see me now do I appear okay great hi charity hi it's great to see everyone and I can provide this this presentation I've provided it before and tried to tool it a little to what you folks do although although since you're so new I'm less familiar with what it is you do so you'll have to apply it as as you go along so I'm going to share my screen because I have some slides that will help us and feel free to just interrupt me if you if you have questions as we go along and then I'll also stop at the end when you have time to reflect you might have more questions that come up um so let me see about sharing my screen here there we go can you guys see that yes okay um let me go to slideshow do you still see pepper should I make him small there okay so here we are um this is what I'm going to go over today just a little background on the public records act um some definitions like public agency public record we'll talk about personal devices and accounts transitory documents um the statutory timeframe by which we as public agencies need to respond to request for public records and then I'm going to touch on a couple of exemptions to the public records act uh that I think you might come across and then we'll have a little q and a moment at the end so um the statement of policy is how things kick off with the public records act and it's very lofty language that will just swell your heart with pride for good government and transparency in government the public records act um is to provide for free and open examination of records and acknowledges that it's in the public interest to be able to review and criticize government decisions the that section goes on to say you know even if sometimes it is embarrassing or inconvenient it is still in the public interest to have that transparency and then when in doubt the public records act is to be liberally construed to implement the policy of transparency so that's a good touchstone for all of us not surprisingly the public records act in Vermont um as across the country and even the national level came out of the Watergate scandal when we all collectively realized how important it was to trust in government and have transparency in government so this is our this is how things begin with the public records act and you can come back to this for the philosophy of the public records act the importance of transparency and also this acknowledgement of um sometimes it's embarrassing and there's also an acknowledgement in this preamble that uh that there's it's important to respect privacy and personal and economic pursuits so from the get go we have this concept that there are competing public interest in the in the public records act um so let's begin to some of the definitions not surprisingly since i'm here making this presentation can i just control board we've decided as a public agency and you can see why when you read this very broad definition any agency board department commission committee branch instrumentality or authority of the state or political subdivision thereof it basically says um is a public agency so here we are we're you're a public agency and you are subject to the public records act meaning that your documents um are subject to request if someone should um should request them um the next definition we have to talk about is what is a public record or public document so a public record is any written or recorded information regardless of physical form or characteristics which is procured or acquired in the course of public agency business and case law makes it clear that it's not just procured or acquired but also generated and I think you know most of us in public service will find that it's um those those are more like are as likely to be requested as the records that are procured or acquired um are those that are generated so what what's public agency business um this this is a a topic that is uh hot off the presses a recent supreme court case here in vermont and by recent i mean two weeks ago three weeks ago um came down and refined this a little bit um and basically what they said was that to be a public record um a uh a document or a record must relate to the functioning of government essentially and and it must be integral to the functioning of government i think to help you understand this i'm just going to tell you a little bit about the facts of this case this was a case where um uvm which is a is a public agency considered a public agency um there was a professor who had i think it was 10 000 potentially responsive records to a public records request and they were emails that related to her work serving i think as editor of academic journals and the court um unpacked um what it what it means to be a public record and then they provided these very helpful factors to conclude that no these records were not um public records and they didn't have to be produced let's talk about those factors here they are the the main ones and i wrote down a few other ones too that they hopefully um laid out for us so um here's some things to look at when you're considering whether your records qualify they contain information bearing on government function they provide government officials with the basis for making decisions they serve to ensure continuity with past government operations or they document the responsibilities of government actions actions oh here we go here's the other fact they they listed a lot of factors it's not just four we got three more um circumstances around or the circumstances around the documents creation so you can look at that for for more clarity um look at the role the record played in the functioning of the agency and the records location and we can talk about that in a little bit but um you know like i said this is truly hot off the presses and i think remains to be seen what this what what impact this might have but i wanted to make sure i covered it and also just listed for you these the main factors that they um mentioned in the decision so that you you'd have those um for your understanding let's talk about the use of personal devices and accounts because i think this can be um confusing if you're not oriented to what the system is so let's say this is my this is my example let's say that i was um uh peppers kids and my kid had a play date and we were gonna meet in the park and i texted pepper and said hey see you see you in the park kids my kid can't wait also i wanted to talk to you about the cannabis control board um i had a couple of ideas and i i'm listing all of my ideas about the cannabis control board he texted me back and it's all about the cannabis control board i've texted him for my personal phone he's texted me from his personal phone is this a public record it is a public record even though we're using our personal phones to have this conversation what this means is that when you have documents or records that relate to public agency business it doesn't matter where they're located it doesn't matter if they're on your facebook messenger or your personal cell phone it doesn't matter that i take notes in my car when i'm dropping my kid off at school on you know whatever i'm note taking device i'm finding in my car it doesn't matter that it's not in the pavilion office building where i normally am outside of a pandemic um this is a public record and i know it sounds this can be hard to believe but it's true and we have a case that clarifies this a pretty recent case and in this case i think it was maybe a gmail account or um a phone a personal phone uh this case is very well reasoned it's not going anywhere it's the law of the land so we have to follow it and i would just encourage you to decide right now how you are going to store your your records um i'll give you an example when i because i oversee as part of my work at the journal's office the consumer assistance program sometimes i will get you know neighbors and friends or family will email my gmail account and they'll say hey charity i got the scam you know can you help i will just forward that to my vermont.gov account because i don't want to ever have to be bothered to think oh i was doing agency business on my gmail account and when i get a public record request i don't want to have to you know be thinking oh i have to search my gmail account i just know everything i just send to my vermont.gov account so good record keeping can can help save you a lot of time and make sure that you're accurately responding to request for public records so that that's that's a big takeaway for today to keep your your records clear on where you're storing them let's talk about transitory records um transitory records are not addressed in the public records act but they do come into play in the general records schedule and i'm not sure what schedule you guys are going to be following but um in our office we follow the general records schedule which in a nutshell is you can throw documents away after six years you can destroy documents after six years um and this is a schedule that is um created by the the archivist and so you can go to the state archives and they have a lot of helpful guidance and definitions to help you implement that schedule and any schedule so a lot of information is there and one such piece of information is transitory records and here is the definition of a transitory record. A transitory record is only needed for a limited period of time in order to complete a routine action or prepare or update a formal or ongoing record so i'm thinking of you know little sticky notes um drafts that are not meant to be you know permanent they're just a first draft and the final version is here these are things that you you literally don't need to hold on to them you can throw them away you can recycle them you can do whatever you want with them they're just transitory however if you have a transitory record that exists and you haven't thrown it away and it's responsive to a public records request then you have to produce it so it doesn't matter if you throw that sticky note or that whatever note to yourself away but if it's transitory you can throw it away but if it's responsive you have to produce it so keep that in mind too as you are you know keeping track of your records and and storing them um this information about transitory records can be helpful to you um the statutory time frame is three business days and that is um very quick as an attorney uh you know a pepper and i are used to um 20 days 30 days 60 days these are the kinds of time frames that we're used to doing and certainly in civil litigation but the statutory time frame for the public records act is very fast three business days and um um for some reason this can be hard to calculate so i made a chart here it is so if you got a you got a request on it on tuesday the fourth you're just counting one two three days later is friday so that's when it's due don't count the day you received it count the following day and i should note that and this is just good practice but in our office if we receive um a dot a records request like at seven o'clock at night we consider it to have been received the following business day ditto for holidays or weekends um and that's just that's good practices because we don't we we definitely get requests in the middle of the night sometimes and it just shortens the time frame even more so i think that's a reasonable approach to take i should also note that the statute does envision there might be so-called unusual circumstances uh during which you really can't respond so quickly you need more time and the more time that the statute allows you is 10 business days 10 full business days not 10 after the first three it's 10 total business days and um it's not just any old unusual circumstance you can come up with there are three that are enumerated and you have to pick one and articulate or pick more than one it's fine but you have to pick at least one and articulate it to the requester and those three unusual circumstances are let's see if i can remember um you have to confer with another state agency there's voluminous records or the records are off-site or there's some issue with a location of the records and and you have to fit into one of those three categories and articulate it to your requester and then you can get that deadline that extension of the deadline so so that's the statutory deadline um i'm just rolling right through these quickly let's talk about some exemptions so the public records act has this very broad definition which you saw of what a what a public record is and then it has all of these exemptions and it has something like 40 or so exemptions that are enumerated in the statute and then it has multi multiple pages of a chart that cross references places in other statutes where something might be exempt from the public records act and what i tend to do when i'm like responding to a public records request is i will refresh my memory you know flip through and make sure that i'm not violating any any statute in that chart that's telling me no no no don't give this document up this is exempt from the public records act um and that's just a helpful tip for you i've highlighted a couple that i think are just relevant and worth considering the attorney client privilege we we all know even even from the movies about the attorney client privilege it's basically that um conversations and communications between an attorney and their client are confidential and it is sort of fundamental to the practice of law in this country anyway so um that privilege comes in under the exemption found in 317c4 which says that records which if made public would cause the custodian of the record to violate any statutory or common law privilege so you don't have to give up documents that would force you to violate the attorney client privilege which of course belongs to the client not the attorney and similarly we we always when i cite this like privilege exemption i also always cite the one before it which which is c3 which references um if you would uh um violate any like rule of professional ethics so that's another because you would be if you violated the attorney client privilege um contrary to your client's wishes so this is a popular one um for my office certainly because we're you know the law office for the state and we do have a little bit of clarity in case law uh on this topic um and it's carnelli versus state which wasn't a supreme court case it was a trial court level case um but still useful and just making sure you understand what this privilege looks like so let's go through just quickly the factors first there has to be an existence of an attorney-client relationship the communication is made for the purpose of facilitating the rendition of professional legal services the client sought the lawyer's skill and training like as a lawyer and the client reasonably would have expected the communications to be confidential so just to pick apart a couple of these um if your general counsel is happens to be an expert on teams and you reach out to him and say oh hey i'm making a presentation i hear you're an expert on teams can you help me well they're not wearing their their lawyer cap they're wearing their um a team's expert cap and so that's not protected similarly if you just see someone who's a lawyer the communication that you have with someone is not necessarily privileged that's not the the the fulcrum on whether uh something is privileged also if you are you know at a stop your kids soccer game and you're shouting to your lawyer across the field and then you say oh no attorney-client privilege well you didn't have a reasonable expectation that that would be confidential so you you know it doesn't apply there either so there you have it a little bit on on the attorney-client privilege let me um talk about the the uh oh i guess i had three today so personal documents is another one that's um important i don't not sure exactly what the nature of the documents that you might see that would be personal um would look like but i mentioned this because it's not totally intuitive um the exemption is 317 c7 and there is a well-known case that helps us understand what this means but i want to just tell you right away a couple of examples of um that i just see regularly one of them is when someone in their professional capacity is emailing the office and they give you their personal um like cell phone number so i've seen this with hey i'm traveling and i don't get service on my work phone call my personal cell phone here's the number redact um i also the example i gave earlier about you know someone emailing me in my gmail account with a question about a scam well when we when i forward that to my vermont.gov account if someone asked for um for that in a public records request we would redact my gmail account as being personal um so there's just like low-key examples that i frequently i i definitely see often that you wouldn't necessarily think of but let's talk about um this case trauma vs bellows falls which really unpacks um what it might mean to be personal and i should i should say that there's different kinds of um there's i see two camps of the personal records at least that our office sees one is things that might be personal and the person is a state employee and or you know a government agency employee and the other is when this person is a constituent or a consumer who's reached out to our office with a consumer question we get we have a lot of that and um you know this is this case deals with an employee so i just wanted to clarify that this is a case about an employee um i'm not sure if you're going to be getting any constituent letters um but that's i think something to consider the differences and the different expectation of privacy between a government employee and someone who is just a you know a citizen so here is what this case um tells us about what makes a document personal the privacy of an individual is involved it reveals intimate details of a person's life it might subject an individual to embarrassment harassment disgrace or loss of employment or friends sometimes we call this the loss of friends case um just really sticks in your head and the information is personal if it would normally not be shared with strangers so this was um a case that was very helpful because in giving us all this language it helps us understand what qualifies as being a um a document that's or parts of a document that are personal such that it would apply that the exemption would apply um so let's just this is the last exemption i wanted to touch on and that is documents that are designated confidential by statute these aren't things that someone like put us put us like a stamp on it i don't think that's not what they had in mind they literally are somewhere in statute it says hey these documents are confidential so here's a little bit of more information about what that means so another statute designates records as confidential for example the ceiling of criminal records statute this is to be construed narrowly to implement a strong policy in favor of disclosure and you can use this when um and i've seen this another case law when invoking the this exemption through 17c1 um would reveal the nature of the document so like an expunged criminal record you can't say like oh well i can't give you this this is criminal record you requested because you know it's basically you're saying it's been expunged because you're not allowed to do so you have to that there's like a tension there and you have to sort of sort that out as well um and the example that i think might come up for you in your world is an operating plan i i know that's in the statute so i i mentioned that as an example now all of these you're not going to have to do this alone i know you're you'll be getting not from me but from another lawyer i know you'll be getting help on um and answering um requests for records but it's helpful for you to just have this information so that you know you know what you're looking at if you get a request in terms of time frame and also just having good record management policies for yourself so with that we're at the q and a portion um let me stop sharing my screen well charity that was incredible um very comprehensive and up to date as well i mean the uvm case i i know we don't know the full contours of that decision quite yet but the um the factors that you laid out the criteria are very helpful for us um we don't have a ton of time you know kyle is going to be our public records officer until we have um our executive director in place i will handle the appeals but um kyle if you would like to ask any questions um as our public records officer and um please feel free otherwise we can certainly email charity at a later date yeah i think i think for the sake for the sake of time and and being able to update the executive director here and getting to um a public comment for everybody in attendance maybe charity um you and i can find a time to talk um tomorrow or next week or something like that sure i'm happy to and pepper i can send you and and nelly the slide so you have them if it's useful that would be incredibly helpful and do you mind if we post them to our website i mean not at all yeah feel free okay that's great thank you so much sure thanks thanks for having me okay thanks charity thank you okay so um i'd like to take uh just the next i guess four minutes to give a brief update on where we stand both with our executive director search and um very briefly touch upon our search for a consultant um let's see my notes on this disappeared hold on so uh with respect to our executive director um this uh you know the legislation set out about a month long process for us to hire an executive director so we have taken some initial steps to do this we were assigned a talent acquisition manager um at the department of human resources um he laid out for us kind of the well trodden path of hiring uh within the state and he also um laid out some alternative some kind of creative outreach that we could do in order to try and um find kind of a diverse candidate pool so uh we um we spoke with um well we posted our job description which is largely a copy and paste from the statute because there are a number of minimum requirements and tasks that are laid out for the executive director within act 164 and we posted that to indeed jobs in vermont.com linkedin facebook the vermont bar association vermont law school alumni association the vermont professionals of color a number of the hbc us um we did print advertisement in seven days uh the times argus and the ruttland heralds um we also got some input on our job description from um the director of racial equities is anna davis um and the social equity caucus and um we had a number of very good applicants well qualified applicants come forward i think we had 15 that applied i think through the um success factors website i had a number of applicants uh just email me directly um i think there was a total of six that met the minimum qualifications for the job um and we tried to you know the position has to be an attorney we tried to limit um you know that that as much as possible so that we weren't rejecting candidates that maybe were attorneys with uh that are inactive status or maybe they were attorneys that are licensed outside of the state or perhaps they weren't licensed at all i mean essentially what we said for a minimum qualification was that you attended you graduated from an accredited law school was our kind of criteria for um meeting that minimum requirement so we had six um candidates that met the requirement um uh we interviewed uh the six candidates um and we narrowed that down and uh later today we will be interviewing our finalists um and hopefully extending a conditional offer um in the near future um with respect to uh our search for consultants we've been done very little work on this um and the reason for that is that we want to see who our executive director is what qualifications that person brings um to the table and um see where we might need to fill in the gaps with a consultant um we've had a number of uh consultants both in-state and out-of-state reach out to us um i'm keeping a list of those folks for when we um can really start the consultant search um you know it's uh not clear at this point we're probably gonna do a simplified bid depending on what the depending on about uh what consulting services we need um and so we're working with um Michelle Anderson and others to help us put together a process for seeking applications for consultants but we haven't done much more than that at this point so um it is 151 um i'd like to open up for public comment and again we don't know how this is gonna work exactly uh i guess if you have a comment please raise your hand um your virtual hand if you're on the phone um i'll i guess we'll do the virtual hands first and then we'll and then i'll open it up for phone comments um you're probably muted if you're on the phone to unmute yourself you hit star six but please wait until i open it up for phone comments and then just speak up and we'll try and do that as orderly as we possibly can so Nelly can you manage the hands as they come up and depending on kind of the number of comments we might have to limit the time that you have but um for now i only see one hand so why don't we um open the floor to David Silverman thank you chair pepper um i was heartened by your testimony at the house government operations committee uh last month uh earlier this month uh specifically where you talked about the need for the board to think about ways to reduce barriers to entry that are unnecessary uh and how you kind of frame that as being part of the equity puzzle um and so i was i was very pleased to hear that um and i wanted to just make sure that the board keeps it in the center of their thoughts here two very powerful sections of the enabling statute uh that give you a lot of discretionary authority to do exactly that uh one is section 904a uh that goes into quite a bit of exposition on what you're supposed to do for small cultivators and mandate to you to grant exemptions and exceptions uh where appropriate um but another and i think this is probably not gotten a lot of attention uh at least among folks i've spoken with is section 901d uh which allows the board to uh set up tiers for all license types um and and when you think about tiers i would urge you not to think just about physical size so it doesn't just have to be well you know retail tier you know you're gonna have a 10 000 square foot store versus a 1000 square foot store you may see applicants looking for a retail license to just sell seeds to growers uh and because of the way the statute was written that is a retailing activity uh that's not something that can be done under a cultivation license under f164 um so i do really urge you just to think broadly about tiers and how you can enable the the sort of full uh expression of this economy through appropriate use of tiers uh thank you very much thank you thank you David thank you David i agree with you um i see another hand up um Amelia if you're able to unmute yeah um hi i was in well i uh i testified before gov ops during all of this s25 stuff um and i actually had the privilege to be in a meeting with you mr pepper during um during the symptom relief oversight committee last week um and i'm heartened to hear that you consider medical reform uh such a big massive priority right now um i know as a patient and an advocate that it has not been a priority in the past um and i would just really urge the board to prioritize within all of this medical reform and the other reform you're looking at um keeping in mind that the cannabis uh the medical cannabis fund is going to be absorbed within the cannabis regulation fund um and for a couple months now i've been urging that we keep those funds separate so that that medical marijuana fund as it's called right now can be put to use toward the patients as opposed to being absorbed into the tax and regulation um system and then also to uh briefly just advocate that the um the thc caps uh be considered for getting struck from this legislation as it negatively impacts both small businesses and medical patients thank you Amelia thank you um i see david templeman did i see you unmute yourself yes can you hear me yes okay um hi my name is david templeman i've been advocating for um townships in the northeast kingdom to opt in um that that time is uh beyond us now and i found my township is uh has opted in so uh we're really excited to move forward and see you guys assembled um i'm gonna start planting seeds now i'm gonna put some ideas in your head about uh the downsides of indoor cultivation as a barrier uh for uh people coming into the business uh indoor cultivation has a very high um capital cost to come in and then an ongoing cost in electricity um it's also an environmental issue as far as uh it being a a big carbon footprint and a source for water pollution i really want to encourage you as a board to really consider um setting a different license for indoor and outdoor cultivation giving advantages to outdoor cultivators uh because inherently the indoor cultivator can cultivate more cannabis under the thousand square foot uh law i think that's it for now thank you thank you hey pepper i i do know that we received a request via our public input form from bt normal nick showerman nick i certainly apologize if i butchered your last name but if you would still like to introduce yourself in your organization um please do so well all right we hear from nick if he's wants to join us does anyone on the phone wish to speak and again you should um hit star six on your phone if you'd like to unmute and you can just uh just speak up if you'd like to hi this is chris white hi we can hear you we can hear you uh i posted to the uh the online form uh just a point uh to be aware of that the the pdf that you guys have for the agenda it's not links for the for the conference as well as for reference materials but the url or uri uh is not um visible it's a it's a friendly link um and it's inaccessible for mobile phones so i don't know if you can provide the actual link to these resources okay yeah is that the link um on the department of libraries website i know that they have some restrictions about what we can and can't put up there but uh no it's from the um ccb.vermont.gov okay apologies for that we'll work we'll work through that thanks for bringing that up thank you we'll we'll try and we'll try and you know these teams urls can be 50 characters long but we'll we'll find a place to um to post that on our website moving forward i appreciate the feedback okay any other last public comments seeing none so uh at this point um we will be um i will be entertaining a motion to go to executive session and this is uh again um a three-hour executive session to interview um some of our finalists for the executive director position we will be adjourning um directly after we conclude um and so um i just mentioned that um because there's not going to be any more substance to this meeting um until afterwards we will be meeting again um most likely next thursday um so we will follow the special special rules um or the rules designed for special meetings until we uh officially adopt a regular meeting schedule um and that will be uh hopefully sooner rather than later um so at this point i would entertain a motion to move into executive session um in order to interview candidates for executive director uh mr chair i'll move to uh move into executive session per one vsa 313 a3 to interview the executive director third great okay well i i don't know if we need to call the roll but i certainly vote in favor of that so point of order can we have two minutes before we click on the executive session link sure yep see you in two minutes thank you thank you everybody thank you all right uh we are recording okay so um it's six fifteen six thirteen um we're out of executive session and um i had to entertain a motion to adjourn i moved to adjourn is there a second as well okay um all in favor second and a third all right okay thank you very much thank you all have a great evening take care all thanks nally for hanging in there no problem