 Andrea can, I think, hand posting back over to me so that I can continue to do what I need to do. And then Tucker and Betsy Ann, I don't know if you have a preference on who should go first in terms of walking us through the work that the Senate is moving towards the floor. But I'll welcome you to raise your hand if you have a sense of who wants to go first. Madam Chair, this is Betsy Ann. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Great. All right. I don't have a hand-raising capability, though, at this point. Okay. Well, you and Tucker both wait in at the same time. But if you're ready to go first, then we'll wait and have Tucker go second. Okay. All right. Thanks. For the record, Betsy Ann Rask, Legislative Council, looking at the, what's now listed as an H742 amendment, that draft 2.1. Apparently, we've been looking at the Senate this morning as well. They're currently meeting. And what I understand happened is that this language was actually instead placed on H681 on its own as a strike all to H681. And the Senate voted it out today. So all of this language, as I understand it, is coming your way, not on H742, but on its own as H681, if I got that number correct. But the Senate made two changes to the language, the elections language that you reviewed before. Section one, the legislative intent does not change. In section two, this is in regard to the voter signatures in the primary, general and local elections. Madam Chair, as you already indicated, the Senate ultimately did not recommend any further changes to this language, specifically the Senate did not move forward with prohibiting a person from submitting more than one candidate consent in the primary or general election. But as you did indicate, Madam Chair, Seneca Bob did discuss that this issue could be discussed further in the future, since candidate consents don't have to start to be filed for the state-level offices until May 14th. Okay, Betsy Ann, Jim Harrison has a question. Jim, go ahead. Yeah, Betsy Ann, do you have a way of bringing up the actual amendment? I'm afraid to switch screens because I will lose it all together and I don't know that I can split screen as easily because I'm not on an iPad. Are you looking at draft 2.1 that's labeled as an amendment to H742? Well, I was looking at it before, but right now I'm just looking at all of you folks. So Sarah had done something, but again, Sarah's on Zoom, but she had done something with sharing a document. I don't know if you have that capability or not. Oh, I'm sorry, I do not. Okay, Sarah, is it possible for you to do it? I'm afraid to, I'm going to lose everything if I try it. Yeah, let me see what I can do. I found the Senate calendar, it still has the language appearing as an amendment to H742, but I believe that this should be the correct language. And Betsy Ann, are you able to see what we're sharing on screen or are you on cell phone only? I'm cell phone only at this point. Okay, so I have in the Senate calendar proposal of amendment offered by Senators White, Bray Clarkson, Colomora, and Polina, and I'm assuming that this is the final language that they worked on last night, section one being legislative intent. So folks, if are you able to see what I'm sharing with you? Not if you're able to. Okay, I'm seeing a few knots. Good. So I will go ahead and scroll through, Betsy Ann, I'll scroll through as you are talking about what we're looking at. And hopefully that will be helpful for folks. If folks, if you're able to navigate away from your Zoom call, you can also go to the Senate calendar for today and find this language yourself if you would like to. Otherwise, I will scroll along with it. So Betsy Ann, I have section two in front of me right now. Perfect. All right. So no changes to that section two in regard to voter signatures and can it consent? I will move on to section three if that works for you, Madam Chair. Yes. All right. There were two changes in section three that the Senate Covops Committee ultimately proposed. The first change is in section three, subsection a, dealing with the ability of the Secretary of State to order or permit temporary elections procedures. And the question was what sort of involvement the governor should have in that order of permitting election procedures. So the original language that Senate Covops was considering was just to say that the Secretary of State is authorized in consultation with the governor to order permit these temporary election procedures. Instead, after hearing feedback from House Covops about Secretary of State and the governor working together in this, during this time, Senate Covops Committee ultimately proposed the language that you see here, which is that the Secretary of State is authorized in consultation and agreement with the governor to order or permit these temporary elections procedures so that the governor would need to agree with what the Secretary of State would order permit during the emergency time for the rest of 2020. Any questions on that, Committee? I don't see any hands raised, but I have a slightly different view now that I'm navigating a document instead of looking at all of your tiles. Warren Kitzmiller, go ahead. I very strongly agree with what the Secretary of State said the last time we were speaking. I mean, and agreement only invites impasse. And I think somebody has to be in charge of that decision. And I think it should be the Secretary of State who oversees elections, not the governor. That's nothing against Phil Scott at all. Those two offices can be at odds and then nothing happens. Yes. So this was a compromise workout because there was concern about wanting to make sure that when we get to the end of the balloting period that there could be no allegation that there was any partisan wrangling. And so the governor's people are willing to take on this role and we can continue to watch this and see if we are concerned that we don't like the way it's playing out. Anyone else want to talk about that change in section three? I see Jim Harrison. Go ahead, Jim. Yeah, hi. Sorry. You have to figure out how to scroll the mute and non-mute. The Secretary of State was from what I know personally and also in listening to the committee was involved in the collection of conversations and the director of elections, as I heard on the Senate GovOps committee last night agreed to the language which was suggested by the chair in the Senate. Okay. Any other questions on section three? All right. That's the end. Take it away. Thank you. And the other change here in this section three is adding this subsection B, which would provide that for any of the temporary elections procedure, the Secretary of State orders or permits under this section. The Secretary would be required to adopt any necessary corresponding procedures that ensure the public can monitor polling places and accounting of votes. This is just supplemental language to ensure that when an election procedure in the year 2020 would differ from current law that there would still be the ability of the public to monitor the polling places and accounting of votes as they consistent with how they normally would under current law. Great. Seeing no hands raised. Section four. Finally, there were no changes to section four. This is that Australian ballot authority for municipalities so that they can move toward Australian ballot more easily with just a vote of the legislative body instead of a vote of the whole municipality. And I have some reminders. Subsection B allows the Secretary of State to waive deadlines in statute or school district articles of agreement as necessary to allow that move to Australian ballot with the municipality needing to request it if the relevant provisions are set forth in the municipal charter or articles of agreement. No change there to that language that you originally saw from Seneca Vots. And that's the end of the elections provisions. Excellent. So shall we hand it over to open meeting law? Tucker? Tucker can unmute himself. Yes, I am here. Sorry, I was annotating the shared screen that was in front of me and getting used to this excellent new technology. So for those listening, Tucker Anderson, Legislative Council, I will start in section six. So, Tucker, hold on just a second. Warren, did you have a question before we begin? Yes, I'm hoping that Tucker can increase the volume. Oh, yeah. Very, very low. Thanks, Tucker, for speaking up. Is this an improvement? Yes. There may be some limitations with the age of the laptop that I am using, so I apologize. But thankfully, you will not hear my dog squeaking toys and my wife whistling for the dog to stop squeaking toys. I will start in section six and cover the changes that were made in Senate GovOps. The first change is going to be in subsection B. This is dealing with these emergency open meeting law provisions and the technology that must be used by a public body when they are meeting electronically. The first change is a small one that starts on line three, and this deals with telephone access to meetings. As you may recall, there is a piece in here that states that the public body shall allow the public to access meetings by telephone. Senate GovOps took some testimony and decided to add the following two words, whenever feasible. So, the public bodies shall allow the public to access the meeting by telephone whenever feasible. There was some recognition while it was snowing during yesterday's meeting that telephone access is not always guaranteed, and they did not want to have meetings closed because telephone access was not possible. The next change is in the last three lines, subsection B, as you are looking at it. This is an entirely new sentence. It was proposed by House GovOps and modified Senate GovOps. So, this new line reads, unless unusual circumstances make it impossible for them to do so, the legislative body of each municipality and each school board shall record its meetings held pursuant to this section. So, this was the recording requirement that was discussed just the other day. Senate GovOps determined that this should be applied to legislative bodies of municipalities and school boards, and that there should be an exception built in for when there are unusual circumstances that make it impossible to record the meeting. John Gannon has a question. So, Tucker, I mean, what does whenever feasible mean? I mean, does that mean, okay, the phone lines are down so therefore you can't use the phone or is it like the town manager in Colchester who needed to hire an additional IT person to do telephonic public meetings? The duty to allow telephone access is going to be dependent on the feasibility of providing that access. There was not a discussion about what the parameters of feasibility would be, but if you have the opportunity to provide telephone access, then there is this mandatory duty to do so. Okay, thank you. All right. If there are no other questions, we'll let Tucker continue. Go ahead, Tucker. We may move on to the next section. This was the Department of Fish and Wildlife Meetings language that you reviewed on Sunday. Senate GovOps made one change to this language, which was to state that the department shall hold not less than five meetings by electronic means. So the language that you proposed to Senate GovOps required the department to hold an adequate number of meetings. Senate GovOps determined it's a policy choice that they should set the minimum number of meetings that must be held and they set it at five. All right. Marcia, go ahead. But I'm going to unmute you right now if I can. Marcia, go ahead and unmute yourself, because I think you unmuted yourself and I remuted you while I was trying to unmute you. Okay, go ahead. Are we good? Yep. Okay. So is that for all the different types of meetings that they brought up, the deer and moose and antlerless, bird, etc.? As applied, this would be five meetings for all. Okay. So in total, five meetings that cover those subject areas. As you may recall, they were required by a combination of statute and rule to hold an annual meeting in each of the five regions over the next few months or summer for each of these subjects. So in total, by my count, that would have been a minimum of 15. And I don't want to speak for the commissioner, but if you go back to Sunday's discussion, I believe that testimony said that they do multiple meetings to make sure that they can get public involvement. So you may have been looking at, you know, three meetings for each of the five regions for each of these subjects, 40 or so meetings that would typically be held. Right. Yes. My understanding was that they had five for the deer and three for moose, etc. So I just wanted to confirm that this is five total for all types of wildlife. Confirmed. Thank you. Great. If there are no other questions, we'll let Tucker continue. Section eight, there is one change to the language governing these deadlines that are applicable to municipal corporations and regional planning commissions. And that was the suggestion from Representative Gannon that permit be added in each instance where a license is covered by these subsections. So you'll notice that permit has been added after license in each instance. That is all for that section. In section nine, this I believe is new to the committee. So I will take a bit more time to walk through what is happening here. Overall, this is operating as a moratorium on disconnections from public water systems and wastewater systems. Each of the subsections that I'll walk you through deals with a different type of system provider. And at the end, we'll deal with the division of enforcement. So in subsection a, this is covering municipal water and wastewater providers. And that not with standing clause at the beginning, not with standing 24 VSA chapter 129 is the generally applicable utility disconnect chapter for these municipal providers. So setting that aside, a municipality shall be prohibited from disconnecting a person from water or sewer services during a declared state of emergency due to COVID-19. Similarly, in subsection B, we are not withstanding any provision of law to the contrary. And stating that a person, which includes companies, businesses, corporations, person who is permitted as a public water system pursuant to 10 VSA chapter 56, which is the chapter that covers licensed public water system operators, and who provides another person water as part of the operation of that public water system shall be prohibited from disconnection during the state of emergency. We move on to subsection C. This is the same moratorium on disconnections applied to those utility providers that are regulated by the public utility commission. The public utility commission put out some guidance and a moratorium on disconnects from other forms of utilities. And this subsection C would extend this to those water system providers. Subsection D explains who's going to be responsible for any violation of this section. Subsections A and B will be enforced by the agency of natural resources. Subsection C will be enforced by the public utility commission. And that is that. Any questions? I don't see any hands raised. Great. All right. Jim Harrison raised a hand. Yes, Jim. Yeah. Not really a question, more of a process question. So the Senate, as I think I heard Betsy Ann say this morning, that this language has been added to H 681 as a strike all. And I assume is on its way back to the house for the floor session tomorrow. Is the expectation if we're in agreement with this that as a committee that the house will take it up and pass it tomorrow and it will be effective as soon as the governor signs it? That's our goal. Yes. Okay. No, that's good. I mean, I just obviously, especially on the open meeting requirements, there's been a lot of concern raised by towns. And I think somebody's got some loud stuff going on. They made the call to to segregate out the gov ops things from the UI and the healthcare provisions. They did that strategically last night just because it wasn't until seven or seven 30 last night that Senate gov ops finished their work on this language. And it wasn't 100% clear whether they were accommodating enough of the concerns that that had come from the house side with respect to this language. And so that's why they made the decision to segregate this out in a different bill. But I think I believe that we have met enough of the concerns at this point that that we can give this the green light. Anybody else have any questions? All right, moving on Tucker, are you done with your section? Oh, is that the end of the bill? Chair, I am done. All right, look at that. All right, any questions committee? So, Mike, I'm going to consider that a raised hand. So why don't you unmute yourself and go ahead and share your thoughts. Let me see if I can. Okay. Okay, how's that? There we go. This is a process question as well. I raised a concern at, yes, Sunday's meeting. And I had Betsy drop an amendment. I realized there's a sense of expediency to get this done. And I'm not ready to push for that amendment right now. But I would like to discuss it a little bit and and perhaps withdraw it just so we have some sort of record that this is something we're considering or that we're mindful of it. Yep. So I'm going to go ahead and let you give us sort of your remind us again of your thought process. But one one legislative process statement about this issue. And that is that we do have until the middle of May to to move forward a separate piece of legislation if we find a way that we can move this forward, that the Senate can agree with. And in this abbreviated timeframe where we're trying to get this, you know, this emergency open meeting law and and Australian ballot stuff out into our communities, we didn't really have time to slow down and look at what we might do for for candidates filing for multiple offices. I will tell you all as a committee that I have heard from other House members who also have concerns about the the same thing that Mike has concerns about about the free for all of having you know, it's file for every office that there is simply because it's easy to do. So, Mike, I'm going to throw it back to you and then as folks have thoughts, please raise your hand and we'll have a committee discussion about this. Thank you and Betsy did drop an amendment and I wonder if she could put that up or if you just want me to explain this. Well, why don't you explain what the amendment did or if you would like to to phone a friend we can ask Betsy and to share as well. There's a number of different ways that we might that we might consider doing some sort of limitation on filing. If we could I don't want to muddy the waters more. I think you shared a little bit or shared the gist of my concern and if we could have Betsy just present that it might be the easiest way to put it out there. Okay, so Betsy Ann, why don't you if you have the ability to call up Mike's amendment and just walk us through it. Hello, it's Betsy Ann. Can you hear me? Yes, thank you. All right, thank you. House Go-Bop's members, I just re-forwarded to you the proposed amendment from Wickey. This is the amendment that you got in your email yesterday and so I just re-sent that. I don't know if you're able to pull it up. I'm sorry, I have technological limitations today with not being able to provide that document for you directly on Zoom, but I can explain what it would do. It would amend that section of the elections draft which is section two in regard to that voter signature elimination so that it would add in subsection B which starts out by saying in the year 2020 adding a new subdivision four that provides that a person shall be prohibited from having the person's name printed on the ballot for more than one office and either the primary or general election and then it would go on to say accordingly a person shall be prohibited from filing more than one consent of candidate form for either the primary or general because that's how you get your name printed on the ballot by filing a candidate consent and under this temporary election law language that's all that is required to get your name printed on the ballot filing a candidate consent since the voter signature requirement is lifted for these elections in 2020 but it would make explicit in the last sentence to say that however such a person may still win any office in the primary or general election as a write-in candidate just make it clear that a person could still run or win office as a write-in even though their name's not actually printed on the ballot. All right Mike anything else you want to say in the way of sparking conversation about limiting the number of candidates? Well it's a concern and as I said I don't want to stand in the way of the whole bill getting sidelined because of this it sounds like there is an intention to perhaps look at this further and I think alongside that I would hope that once we get past this piece we might look at establishing a study committee in general to look at these kind of considerations for elections and counting should something like this happen in the future again so we have have something in the green books ready to go that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Thoughts committee? Jim unmute yourself there you go. Sorry I appreciate Mike's amendment I did listen into the Senate GovOps and I think as you mentioned before they indicated because of all the concerns and possible constitutional questions that maybe they could consider that later and if that's you know what we're going to do that would be fine with me as well. This year is very unique and on so many fronts but clearly I don't sure the public good is being served if each of us put our name on you know ten different offices that we might you know I tell my grandchildren this is the year I ran for governor some day so sounds good but it's not really practical so I like the sentiment of Mike's amendment and if there is an opportunity in the next month and a half to or month to consider it I would certainly like to do that as well. Great I appreciate you guys offering to work on that and and I would recommend that you go ahead and and continue to do some research into how to how to do that. I know that the Secretary of State in in our discussion and I think also in the Senate discussion had talked about being uncomfortable with with requiring for instance some sort of electronic list of signatures just because the town clerks would then need to verify them as being registered voters in that community or in that district but if you want to continue to work on this I would welcome you to do that. Any other committee members have thoughts about this issue of candidates filing for multiple offices? All right I don't see any names or hands popping up virtually. All right excellent well we have we've run into the end of our hour of a lot of committee time and oh Marsha go ahead. We had another piece of legislation that proposed legislation that we looked at on Sunday and that was about the extension of deadlines for municipalities. What's the status of that language? Did we see that Tucker or Betsy Ann? Madam Chair this is Tucker. We did see that that was the discussion about adding permits to the list of licenses programs and plans it would be extended for the municipalities. Okay thank you yes. Warren you're on unmute. Oh am I I'm sorry I didn't mean to be sitting there quietly. That's quite all right we're all attuned to hearing when people cough now that we're all a little paranoid about it. Any other questions about what we looked at for language today? Okay so feel free to raise your hand I'm just going to say a few sort of summarizing words here about what we're doing. We have there's there's a grand chart of when committees are allowed to when house committees are allowed to meet over the next couple of days and we have a few time slots that have been allotted to us tomorrow. I have not yet put together an agenda for those time slots and so I'll be working on that later on today but just so you know our agenda includes a meeting time tomorrow from 10 30 to 12 30 and or a meeting time from three o'clock to four o'clock. So just pencil those into your busy calendars and we may meet during one or both of those times and Thursday we are again allotted some zoom time from 2 15 to four and so please pencil that in as well and and we will we'll see if we can put together some agenda items for that. We sort of left off last week when we were last in person with with just getting the last few pre crossover bills out the door through the floor and all of that. We have not yet really jumped in in earnest with post crossover work although we had a few things around the police data collection and and use of force issues that we had anticipated doing post crossover on a Senate vehicle that has not yet arrived obviously. So what we do over the next couple of days is is still a little bit unclear since we're not yet able to officially vote bills out of out of committee in this virtual manner. Bob Hooper has a question. I may have missed it but did the actual crossover date come out? Well we pushed the pause button on the session last basically at the end of Thursday because all day Friday we were dealing with emergency response legislation and so I don't know what official negotiations the House and Senate leadership have had around what constitutes an extension of crossover but for right now we're going to consider that all of the things we intended to do before crossover are still able to be in play and and we will come back to them when we need to and in the manner that we need to. Any other questions? No questions. Excellent. All right well I want to thank all of the support folks who've been here to help hold our hand as we accomplish our very first Zoom meeting. Hi there's Andrea back. I think we can go ahead and turn off the live stream so I'm going to see if I can do that since technically I'm the host right.