 Karen Gennett from Crime Research Group. Thank you. Okay, it's Monica Wieber from the Department of Corrections and I told Rebecca, but I'll apologize to all of you. I have to leave by seven o'clock. So. I guess I'll go. Evan Meenan with the Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriff's. Hey, Julio. Hey. I am Huichierto, appointed by Susana Davis and I'm a data engineer. I am Susana Davis, the Racial Equity Director for the state. I'm Elizabeth Morris. I am the juvenile justice coordinator at FSD within DCF. Julio, you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Julio Thompson, Director of Civil Rights, Union Attorney General's Office. And our new, you're replacing David. Sure. Right? It's going to be on the panel. Is it? Dave Shear has left our office to go to the Cannabis Control Board, his general counsel. So I'm filling in that slot until they replace him in their office. Okay. Oh, I thought it was official. So we're not yet official or... I'm officially replacing David. David is left. So. All right, welcome. And let's see, who's there? Mark or Ian, if you could introduce yourselves? Hi, Ian Loris. I'm a Aetan summer assistant, just going to be taking notes and reporting back to him on the meeting. Thank you so much. So one more, I think that's Mark. Let's see this Mark on here. Well, Mike is not working. Sorry, okay. And I guess this is recorded. So thanks for coming everybody. And so Aetan asked that we were called that we were about to talk about Evan's suggestion last time we met, which was over, I guess it was two weeks ago, before Labor Day, right? And Evan, you had submitted then sort of a, right before we met or something, but we didn't have a chance to either hear you sort of walk us through it, it's my recollection, and then discuss it, but it had something to do with relating to all the entity itself, right? What, where we thought the entity should go, and why, and you had some model legislation perhaps. And so Aetan hoped that we could hear from Evan and walk through that proposal and then discuss it. He also shared with all of us tonight, a document he asked me to sort of pull together and edit for him, lightly format at it really. And that's what we've all been previously working on with the various charts and the mission and all of that. And he sent that out too, under the title in which it says for you, our DAPT Act 65 Report Dog Draft. So that's something I pulled together and walked through with him. And it's basing sort of a format that we used in our prior report submission to the legislature December of 2020. And specifically what I did was we had an introduction section in that and so we, I copied and pasted the Act 65 that we're addressing and then I can walk through what's going on there and it will highlight sort of areas we've come to an agreement on areas that we started to just discuss but hadn't agreed upon and then sort of highlights the gaps and need to know. So sort of open to how we wanted, which makes sense to go over first? Should we jump into Evan's suggestion or go over this report? Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe because Julio's first meeting here, maybe it makes sense to just walk through that draft report because by walking through it we sort of summarize for him and remind ourselves what we did before Labor Day. All right, so do you guys have that open? And if that's fine, I'll summarize and go through it and please jump in with any questions or suggestions once we do it. All right, so cover page with our title and members and to be finished, those are placeholder holders. So as I said, the introduction, again, borrowing from our format of the last report, just effectively copied and pasted the actual legislation that we're here to address. And that is specifically section 1965. The section 19 is verbatim and only excludes the portion of the legislation addressing funding, supplementing, payment of consulting consultants that we might go to during this period as well as reimbursement for time and expenses for community members on this committee and this panel for the time that they would be devoting to this project. So that is that, that's the introduction. Then I started doing Roman numerals after that, pulling from the language of back to section 19, there is little a and then it tells by November 15th or before, this report that we've been asked to do shall address and it goes through one through five things we should do. And we've been going through that sort of in a very free flowing way and not and sort of putting them in as subheadings. What I did here was I literally copied and pasted these one through fives and turned them into Roman numerals. So we could sort of keep track and figure out where the things we've been talking about fit into and where we still have room to to address the issues we've been tasked to address. So that gets us to page two, which is Roman numeral two, which is where hopefully Evan can lead us into this discussion and we were asked by the legislature to identify where the data entity should be situated and the advantages and disadvantages of being a standalone body or being housed in state government. Now here A, there's a subheading there that says that the new data entity should be called the office of social justice statistics, full disclosure. This is something that when Etan asked me to incorporate the edits from our last meeting, he said that this was his idea to come up with. He was tired of us not having a name. He recognized and who the legislation identifies it as a bureau, but I've raised in previous discussions problems that I had with identifying as a bureau. We kept running into an entity and Etan suggested this and which I see your hand if I could just finish this thought and then I'll have Etan. Yeah, no problem, no problem. My initial response to him. So one of the reasons he explained about picking this name was a addressing our concerns about scalability and not keeping this to be so narrowly identifiable as racial equities only, right? So that was the approach with choosing social justice. He chose office, he wasn't beholden to it. My immediate reaction office was the office department agency, all of those have certain meanings in terms of where they fall within the hierarchy of the executive branch and we can discuss that more. And he also thought he wanted to know what we thought about this name as a group since this is a new introduction to this and if we do decide on this name or any other name that warrants, we have an explanation of why we really don't like the bureau. And then the second part to it which is what's being addressed is, well, where should it be in state government or outside of state government? I think as a group, oh, sorry, I'll stop there, would you? Yeah, I just wanted to say I really liked the idea of the social justice statistics, whatever department agency, whatever we want on that side, but I think the social justice statistics allows for what we've been talking about or it's just like race, but also like the intersections of race with gender and sexuality and all these things. And it allows us to envision a broader Vermont data warehouse of social justice without having it be that we're trying to do everything all at once. So I like that we're focusing on our mission but envisioning a broader future. Do others wanna share their feelings or their reactions to that too at this point? Seems like might as well jump into the discussion as we're going through this. Well, I can start, I mean, I like the name. I think that I wanna also, obviously this is just the beginning and we would need to give a little bit more description and talk about the fact. I think very clearly that the first focus of this office needs to be around racial justice because that's what the statute says and I think that's what our body is interested in doing. And explaining that the reason for the broader title is to allow the state to have more opportunities to expand it. I just would wanna make sure that we're not giving people an impression that we're forgetting what our main point is. I don't know if that makes sense. And I think that, so that's on the social justice statistics part, I think the conversation about office department agency is a whole nother conversation. Would she, is your hand back up? Yes, my hand is back up. I agree with you that we need to make sure that there's like clear what it is that we're talking about race and like very specifically race around this initiation. And for those of us who don't work in government and maybe at another time, but what is the difference between office agency and department? I would like to be clued in. Yeah, no, I think this is sort of one in the same way. Evan, you wanna answer? It's like Richie's reading, wish he's reading my mind because in my mind, what this is called an office department, bureau, whatever it is, I think could depend a little bit on where it's home becomes because that might influence things. For example, if this were to become part of, and I don't wanna jump the gun, but if this were to be elevated within the agency of administration, like I suggested, then it would probably be a department of co-equal ranking with the other departments. If it was gonna be a freestanding entity that's not tied to another agency, then it could be an office, it could be a board, it could, you could kind of make up whatever you wanted to make up really, depending upon the governing structure. But I think to at least to some degree, whether it's department of office of, bureau of or any other sort of word of that nature might be influenced by where it ends up being housed. Does anyone else wanna weigh in on that, right now? My sort of simple stupor thinking of it is, is departments all within agency, is that right? You think, I mean, there's a hierarchy, right? Offices are often the standalone highest level, right? Office of Attorney General, Office of the Defender General, all separate entities. Agency of the administration has individual departments within, is that everything? But like you said, Evan, there's always sort of this exception like there's boards and councils and commissions, but I don't think we're, I don't think we're gonna go into that territory hopefully, but I guess you never know. It depends, I mean, I gotta be honest, I mean, putting together the draft that I circulated last time, I was very much informed by the structure and functioning both good and bad of my former employer, which was the Natural Resources Board, right? Which was effectively an office, sorry, that was my dog. It was an office really run by one person, a board chair, but there was board members that acted in advisory capacity, very similar to this sort of advisory board that we were talking about last time. So that entity was named after the advisory group that was basically run by the chair of the group. But yeah, I mean, in my mind, it's usually like agency department office in that sort of tiered hierarchy with notable exceptions, like the ones Rebecca just mentioned, the Office of the Attorney Generals and the Defender General's Office. But interestingly, those are both offices that are run by a singular person with no sort of advisory panel. So that might be that decision to call it that might also have historical roots in how it's structured and governed. Susanna? Yeah, I just wanted to agree generally with what Evan had said before about how what we call it will likely depend on where it ends up and also to follow up on this discussion in which he's question about what is the difference between all of those terms. And it's interesting because generally speaking, I mean, you do the same thing with job titles, right? Are you a coordinator or a director? I can't tell you how many jobs I've had that I was the director and I was the only staffer, right? So it has to mean something too, right? It has to matter. And I think about the agent even within the executive agencies, for example, the IT department is called its own agency and it has its own secretary, even though that work falls under secretary young in the agency of administration or we have a department of public safety which arguably does enough of a heavy lift that it does agency work, it's called the department or like public service. So there are times where we break the trend and it feels odd. And so as we think about citing this, I would just encourage us as much as possible to come up with a name that not only reflects the importance of the work, but also that we don't fall into a pitfall. Like for example, if you call something a coordinator role, it's a certain pay grade, right? So I would just want us to be cautious about that. What you said about having to mean something, Susanna, maybe that is the starting point for us with this discussion is just sort of reminder of what we at least have found common ground on, right? Common ground being independence. We've submitted reports on this, stressing this point. Independence to ensure that people can trust the information, right? And independence in terms of not feeling like it is a political tool of any particular agency, any particular bend, any particular politician, right? So independence was one, I remember. The other thing that's emerged with our discussions this summer has been a concern that there'll be stability, that there'll be stability both in the sense that there is some kind of scalability, right? That it can grow and be flexible and nimble enough, stability and stability in terms of funding I've heard us talk about, right? And so that has been a driving force in terms of thinking about, do we wanna put this or embed this within a well-established state entity or is it safe to presume that it is more vulnerable to having funding cut if it was a standalone new entity? Is that fair? Do others wanna share? Is that what we are? Well, common ground, are we missing other things? So we have a lot of people who are pretty experienced in state government and working with the legislature in various levels and seeing how funding works and not works. If I could just comment on the concern about stability and keeping this well-funded because that is a concern of mine as well, right? And making sure that this means something, this has staying power. You know, I was talking with Matt Valerio before this call and he kindly reminded me that anything can be chopped, right, like even the most established offices can have their budgets slashed in any given year, right? And so that it's almost a false sense of security to think, well, if we embed this within a well-established office agency that that somehow protects it. So that was key point number one. The other was, I think my question to him was just like, are there such things as multi-year funding grants, right? They just didn't know if they were done, if they were ever done, and if so, how many years can you get going forward? And again, please correct me for everyone else on this call who has a lot of time in government work. But again, Matt said, yes, it certainly could happen. You could get funding requests for multi-year projects passed through any given session, but it can also be rescinded the next year, right? If the circumstances change. What others wanna share in terms of their experience with funding and that? I'll agree with Matt. Anything can be cut and it all depends also on the way different departments put their budgets together differently. Of course, we've all gotta follow the direction from the executive branch or in the executive branch and how we do it related to the governor's priorities. And so a lot of times that impacts what gets funded and how the money gets allocated out to different departments. Is that true for the Secretary of State's office and the auditor's office? Is it that in terms of getting approval from the governor? I mean, again, I'm trying to sort of explore the extent of independence that these different entities have within the executive branch. I don't know. I know that the, well, I think that the HRC, it is independent and yet its funding is very heavily reliant on whether it is included in the governor's proposed budget. The same thing was true for the Natural Resources Board where I worked there. It was, they had to submit a budget. Fingers crossed that the governor includes it unedited in his office's budget and that it makes it in there. That was an entity where some of its funding came from independent revenue sources. Well, actually, that's not entirely true. I think that, I'm trying to think how it worked now. I almost wanna say that many of the revenue that it was collecting directly, aside from its enforcement costs, actually did go into the general fund. And then it had to try and recoup those through the preparation of its own budget to make the sales pitch that it was self-funding itself, at least in part, in good part. I also, having worked at the Agency of Natural Resources, which is a much larger environmental entity, I can tell you that from my perspective, which may not be 100% accurate, it seemed like it was a little bit easier for a larger entity to defend its turf when it came to budget positions, things of that nature. And it was a little bit more difficult for a smaller entity to do that. Evan, did you find within the agency, because the Department of Corrections and the Department for Children and Families, along with four other departments are in the Agency of Human Services. And so within the budget building cycle, our finance directors and commissioner present a budget to the secretary and the chief financial officer for the agency, they review everything first. And even within the agency, depending on circumstances, there can be a lot of pushback or conversation around that internally before it even gets to the governor's office, to budget and finance. Yeah, so I was not really part of the budgeting process when I was at the Agency of Natural Resources, but my understanding of the process is similar to what you just described. So that agency also has several different departments, Fish and Wildlife, Parks and Rec, and Environmental Conservation. And my understanding is they each would prepare their own budgets, submit them for agency approval. And so theoretically, yeah, there could be some trending down or expansion and there could be a little tension if one department wants some money and another one wants another one, whereas at the smaller entity, the Natural Resources Board, we had one person that basically did all of our office finance stuff and they put together a budget, got the chair to approve it, and then ultimately the entire board to approve it, which was, how much were they reviewing it? That's tough to say, honestly. And then at the end of the day though, both sets of budgets would go to the governor's office for review and inclusion in his ultimate proposal to the legislature. Does anyone happen to know what the Secretary of State and then Otter's office has to do in terms of budget approvals in terms of its fall service, similar process to what Evan just described? I don't, but I imagine it's fairly similar. Yeah, I mean, we all kind of get instructions, budget instructions at a certain time during the year to start putting things together, an idea about how much money is available, whether or not we need to cut, whether or not we can, what's sort of what's happening in terms of the finances? And those instructions all come out from, well, it's finance and management, right? So they sort of manage the process. Elizabeth, do you have your hand up? Yes, I do, I don't have a solution or an answer to that question, Rebecca, but I have another concern that's related to unfortunately bring up. I'm concerned about the entity's data being utilized against itself for funding. If at some point down the road, the entity reports something that shows that we're trending down in disparities or we don't have disparities, et cetera, et cetera, it then being utilized as a tactic against itself and saying, so we don't need to be tracking this anymore, it no longer exists, the problem is solved, which obviously is just not true. We always need to be tracking this for as long as our systems are established. So that's just another concern I have. No, that's a good point. Just thinking short of a constitutional amendment. It's always a vulnerable thing, right? This is always disappearing, but yes, how to insulate it so that it doesn't, the reporting itself doesn't turn, which again, seems to be that whatever reporting requirements go to the legislature so that the policymakers can make the decision as to what to do or not do with the data and the analysis, I mean, that can always inform what they'll do to continue to prove for funding, but at least it's not, again, I think it's almost underscoring the independence part, right? And from being subordinate to a larger office or agency. Okay, well, maybe this is the point, Evan, that you want to introduce your materials on this subject, because isn't this on the section? Yeah, and some of these questions are answered in the materials that I prepared and they were circulated in advance of the meeting. Maybe I'll just sort of give like a little preview and then does it make sense to share the bill, Rebecca? Yeah, okay, I'll do that. So basically, Julio, also for your benefits since you weren't here last time. So we've had this conversation about these five, I think it's five questions we're supposed to answer for the legislator's request. And one of those questions is where should this be housed? And when that came up at the last meeting, I again asked how much consideration had been given to housing this within Susanna's existing office because her enabling legislation does two things. One, I want to get the language right. It directs her to, let's see what it says, do two specific things, oversee a comprehensive organizational review to identify systemic racism in each of the three branches of state government and inventory systems in place to engender race, inventory systems in place to engender racial disparities. And then the second thing is managing oversee the statewide collection of race-based data to determine the nature and scope of racial discrimination within all systems of state government. So it seemed to me like part of her charge was to do this sort of data collection but on a statewide all branch of government basis and we're really talking about sort of a subset of that charge which is to collect race-based data within the context of the criminal and juvenile justice systems. So again, just to avoid duplication, I was thinking, well, it seems like there's an entity that's supposed to at least be considering doing this. So does it make sense to house this bureau or office whatever it ends up being called there with whatever resources that office needs in order to get the job done? So for discussion purposes, I volunteered to put together something in writing that would illustrate how that change would look. The easiest way I could conceptualize it in my mind was just to draft the legislation. So that's what I did. And then I also put together a memo that sort of explained what I was trying to accomplish. And so the way in which I did it is to elevate Susana's office into a governmental department within the agency of administration. And the reason why I chose the agency of administration, it's not that I like that agency better than any other. It's just that Susana's office already has a connection with the agency of administration by statute. It's housed within the agency of administration with administrative legal and technical support from that agency and general supervision by the governor unless it's delegated to the secretary of administration. So that's the first thing I did. And then the second thing was Aiton had this idea about having the advisory panel consist of the sort of new makeup of the criminal justice council which there's some pros and cons to that, but I included it so that we could all see what it would look like with the notable addition of the defender general's office which does not currently have a seat the criminal justice council. So to effectuate that, all of these changes I had to in this bill amend the enabling legislation for both the agency of administration and the office of racial equity director. And I will pull up my draft and I guess just try and walk through it. If I can, if I'm going too fast or too slow, just people can let me know. I'm just gonna make sure I pulled the right one. Okay, I think that should be it and everyone should be looking at the draft bill with some comments on the side. Okay, so I tried to use the format that ledge council uses. This is just sort of like a big caveat that I put this together for discussion purposes. It's not as though this is a formal proposal coming from the department. States attorneys haven't voted on this or anything like that. I'm just trying to do something that helps out here. I've tried to note where I'm addressing each of the questions that our DAP is supposed to answer and I'll flag that this draft doesn't answer all of them because I don't think that all of them need to be addressed in legislation. So I'm attempting to answer question one where it should be located which is the agency of administration. I'm not sure whether question two related to staffing is something that would need to be answered in the legislation or if that would just be answered through the sort of budget and position number process that this new entity would have to navigate on its own. I've tried to answer to a certain degree question number three which is what is this entity's mission gonna be? But I also think that simply because the enabling legislation has to state that at least implicitly. But I also think that this entity could come up with its own mission statement if it wanted to other agencies and departments have in state government. Monica, what's up? Just my little two cents on the positions from my experience. If we have a good idea about what positions that we want it's important for those positions probably to be created and established in the language. Otherwise it is hard to get new positions in my experience. Yeah, I've also had to deal with position numbers and getting creative with them and it's a pain in the butt. And I tried to, yeah. So I mean, I try to include in here a little note that I don't really know how that process works. Maybe someone has some more expertise and we could finesse it either in this bill or in whatever report we put out if we feel pretty strongly about the positions. Yeah, so section nine. So question four relates to now this entity is supposed to do that data collection. I thought including something in that might be a little too prescriptive and might confine the entity. So you'll see later on that what I try to do is just require that they create rules that govern how they're gonna do this. That way they have the flexibility to be a little self-directing. They can answer the question because they're gonna be the experts while at the same time if it's memorialized in a rule that provides some transparency for the public but it's just a suggestion. And I really did not include any type of answer regarding question five about enforcement authority, how it's gonna enforce this data collection because I don't know the answer to that. It just, I can't come up with a good proposal. So that's a question maybe for the full RDAB group. All right, so I'm just gonna go through it. So the first section that I amended is just the agency of administration's enabling legislation because of the existing connection between the office of racial equity and the agency of administration. And so the purpose here is just to add that there is a department of racial equity. It could be called something else but it would be one of, it'd be the seventh department now within the agency of administration. Advisory capacity, yeah, so. Right, okay, so what I tried to do here is bolster some of the independence because this indicates that some of these, some components of the agency of administration are really advisory and I know that we had had this idea that there would be some type of governing body or what would be the department of racial equity. And the office of racial equity already has like an advisory panel but I didn't want that, I wanted to distinguish that panel from the other types of boards and committees that are already existing within the agency of administration and make it clear that, try and make it clear anyway that that panel really is connected with the department of racial equity and it's the commissioner of racial equity that would be responsible for executing all of their recommendations. And then elsewhere I tried to build in a little independence for the department. That way it's really, the advisory panel is making these recommendations to the commissioner of racial equity and that commissioner of racial equity is running that department and it's gonna have some independence. So that was the goal of this change. Let's see, what is this one? All right. Oh, okay, yeah, this was an interesting one. I didn't even know that this thing existed, the employee misclassification task force. It's within the agency of administrations enabling legislation but it's overseen by the office of the attorney general which is kind of interesting. And it occurred to me thinking about it that theoretically there could be racial disparities in employee classification. So I said, well, if we're monkeying with the agency of administrations enabling legislation, let's just go ahead and be presumptuous and put the commissioner of racial equity or designee on there and maybe they could spot some disparities in this classification problem but that's not technically part of our charge. I just thought it was another change that made sense if we're gonna be messing with this part of the statutes. Okay, so the only point, so this talks about how the secretary of the agency of administration is appointed and then the commissioner of each department is appointed. Now, when I got here, there was a couple of different things we could have done because the agency of administration is in one part of the Vermont statutes and the office of racial equity is in another. So we could have just struck everything in the office of racial equity and moved it all into the part of the statutes that deal with the agency of administration just like some of the other departments are treated. That seemed a little bit redundant and like more work than needed to be done. So I just said, let's just leave it and then make the cross-references when we have to because there's already a process in place for appointing the racial equity director. This, the sole purpose of this amendment is to specify that, hey, the appointment of the commissioner of racial equity is addressed elsewhere in statute. Go read that statute. Julio, I see you have your hand raised. I think you may have moved past the point but I'll just briefly explain to the light curiosity. The classification task force has to do with classification of whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor. Okay. I wasn't sure if it was like someone trying to say they should be classified as a different type of employer, a different position or a different step within state government. Got it. It relates to concerns about wage theft by employers who misclassify workers as independent contractors and thus deprived them of either minimum wage or overtime. Got it. Thanks for that. That helps me at least. And before you leave the point on the appointment and term and the sites to the two sections under title three, I just took a look at one of them, the 2251s is a sense because it gives a sense of what that one is. And I understand 2251 is saying the appointment of the commissioner of racial equity would be the secretary of the administration. Yes, exactly. Do you know what does 5005? Yeah, I think we can jump there. So 5005 is the existing statute that deals with the appointment of the racial equity director. And let's see, I can scroll down there and get there just a couple of pages away here that way everyone can look at it. Racial. Okay, so it's the governor makes the appointment to the commissioner as the executive director from a list of qualified candidates submitted by the racial equity advisory panel. So it's really like, who do we want to be doing the appointing and the reviewing? I'm sure there's pros and cons to both approaches. I just wanted to make it clear that the way that current commissioners within the agency of administration are appointed differs from the way that Suzanne is currently appointed. So there should probably at some point be a discussion about which is the better way to do it if there is a better way to do it. I see Mark says by design. And I don't know that we have to make a decision now, but it was, I didn't want to not point that out and then have it come as a surprise later. Well, under both appointment schemes, they would be reporting to the governor. I mean, that's the very essence of being within the agency of administration, right? Well, there's sort of, well, I guess there's a difference between being appointed by the governor and having your, the execution of your daily job functions be supervised by the governor. So we're going to want to have to make, we might want to have to make a distinction there. I mean, another point of conversation is just, you know, what are, what, you know, when should this person be removed? Right, I mean, and I didn't try and address that question, but, you know, for example, the chair of the natural resources board can be removed like whenever, all of the, you know, for no reason or any reason, that's not discriminatory, I suppose. And the other board members though, have a set term and removing them is a little bit more difficult. So we might want to have that conversation as well. Susanna, is this the point where it makes sense for you? If you remember offhand, you had mentioned that when this legislation was still in draft form, there was a different appointment or accountability design. And I see the chat there, maybe. Yeah, and I think Mark can probably speak to this because he was involved in those conversations. I wasn't, I got all my information from people who were brave enough to tell me about it afterwards. But my understanding is that originally, the advocates who were calling for this had wanted the office to be independent. And in the original draft bill, I think the governor did not have higher and fire abilities. That was why he originally vetoed it because it was interpreted by the executive's counsel to be an infringement of his higher and fire abilities. And so the executive order that he then drafted mirrored the bill almost identically except for that point and then the new legislation that ended up being passed mirrored that EO. So technically this bill and the EO are both concurrently in effect. Yeah, and so these two provisions here really only deal with appointment, which I do want to, like appointment is different than the sort of oversight issue. And so with, so Susanna right now, it's the panel makes a recommendation, the governor appoints for existing commissioners within the agency of administration. It's the secretary with the approval of the governor and consent of the Senate makes the appointment. It doesn't seem as though consent of the Senate is necessary right now for Susanna's position. So there's certainly some similarities. The governor is gonna be involved, but the process is a little bit different. So it's just something to keep in mind as people think about this. Let's see, what was this next section? Okay, so this was one way in which I tried to give the department a little bit of independence from the agency of administration, even though it would be within the agency of administration. So this statutory section talks about what each commissioner of a department may do with the approval of the secretary. All of, you know, what I wanted to make clear though is that if this department of racial equity comes into existence, it doesn't need secretary approval to adopt rules and procedures for the internal administration, for its own internal administration. That way, you know, when it comes time to promulgate those rules about how we're gonna do data collection, when we're gonna release it, who we're gonna release it to, those don't need to get run by the secretary of administration first under this proposal. It would be the department commissioner would be able to do that. This is just, this is probably a little bit redundant, but every other department within the agency of administration has like a little, a very, very tiny statutory section that just establishes its existence. So that's what this does, but with a citation to all of the other statutory provisions that deal with the department of racial equity. But then, I mean, like I was saying, another option could be just to strike the existing enabling legislation and draft new enabling legislation within the same chapter of the agency of administration. Maybe it's, you know, tomato, tomato, but there's just two different ways to do it. And then at this point here in section seven, this is actually when we get away from the agency of administration's enabling legislation and we get into Susanna's existing enabling legislation. So some of this is just changing the words to make it make sense. So for example, instead of having a position of executive director, we've got an agency, you know, and just clarifying that it's supposed to work within all branches, like even the legislature potentially, like there could be some disparities that exist there. I don't know how much thought they've given to that, but it could exist and this department would have the authority to investigate that. Oh yeah, this is the same thing. It's just clarifying that it's not restricted to the executive branch of government where these problems might exist and should be resolved that it might also exist in the legislature and the judiciary and this entity should have the authority to track that down and change it if possible. Now, this was my attempt, but it mirrors to a certain degree the existing language, but this was an attempt to again reiterate that the expectation is to have some independence. So the agency of administration is there to provide the sort of logistical support, administrative, legal and technical, but aside from that, this entity is supposed to act independently and neither the governor's office nor the agency of administration should be preventing the department from executing its powers and duties. And then this just changes, oh yeah, so this is really just for consistency's sake. So in other sections of the agency of administration is enabling legislation, they talk about things like advisory committees. They don't use the word panel. So this was just me trying to be consistent. It doesn't mean that the panel, that's a bad name for it. I was just striving for consistency. This next section, this is where I was trying to follow Aton's suggestion of seeing if the new makeup of the Criminal Justice Council would be a good makeup for this advisory panel. I'm not entirely sure. It results in a very long list of members and a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but so what I tried to do was not really edit that suggestion, just do a straight merge. So it's gonna be, it would be the existing members. Maybe I forgot to change five here, that number. It'd be the, I tried to mesh basically the existing panel structure, the current makeup of the Criminal Justice Council and then add a seat for the Defender General's office. So it's a big long list, but that was the suggestion. So I included it so that everybody could see it. This is where I added the Defender General's office. So we could go through them. If this is even in the Criminal Justice Council as well. So I left that. And this, I just, this was, they wanted staggered terms on the panel. It seemed irrelevant now that they're already appointed and that the makeup of the panel was gonna get much bigger. So I just struck it, but rather than trying to stagger the terms of 12 or 15 people, which I see that your hands up. Yeah, I have several questions. And I'm sorry if maybe it's because maybe you're gonna be repeating yourself, but just want some clarifications. So first being like, how does this sort of relate to the bigger picture of what we're tasked with, of like helping create this Bureau of Racial Justice Statistics or whatever its name is gonna be. And the second question is this, that committee or advisory committee looks a lot like the racial equity task force. And how then would that differ from that? Yeah, yeah, those are both good questions. So what was interesting is, so in the legislation, Act 65 when it charged us to answer these questions, another thing that it asked us to do was to come up with draft legislation. And I suspect that the reason why is because if this entity is going to exist in the state government, it needs to be created and authorized through legislative enactment. So the General Assembly needs to promulgate what's called enabling legislation that creates this thing and defines the scope of its authority. And then the entity can be given additional powers to promulgate procedures, rules, all of that kind of stuff to fill in the gaps in that enabling legislation. So we'll get there in a minute, but you'll see this legislation doesn't say, for example, the Bureau should follow these protocols or these best practices when it collects data. Instead, it says, Bureau, you're gonna be the expert on this. You come up with rules that explain how you're gonna do that. So the way in which this addresses, the creation of the entity is, if this bill were to pass, the entity would come into existence like that. It would just happen. Well, with an appropriation. In terms of this committee, the committee, we had had conversations about having some type of, I don't remember what we were referring to it as, but some type of governing body or advisory panel or something that would be the entity that would advise whoever was running the Bureau on what questions it should be asking and where it should be exploring disparities. What I realized was that Susanna's office already has this thing called the Racial Equity Advisory Panel. So if Susanna's office is going to house the Bureau, the question then becomes, can that existing panel act as that body that's going to direct the research questions that are being asked? And if the answer to that is yes, and if ATON's suggestion to make the composition of that panel look more like the Criminal Justice Council is adopted, then this statutory section would need to be changed in order to make that happen. Yes, Susanna. Sorry. No, I can wait, would you go ahead? Yeah, I just have a follow-up to that because I don't, I guess I'm missing a connection point here because this bill reads to me that this is to sort of reorganize the Office of Racial Equity for it to be under the Agency of Administration. Are you saying that this is sort of stepping stone in order to then create the Bureau under the Department of Racial Justice and doing the Department of Laws for more authority to be able to be given to this Bureau? Yeah, I'm just a little lost. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Except there, you know, and so yeah, pretty much. That's really close because, so Susanna's office already has a statutory obligation to coordinate data collection on racial disparities and because it's supposed to be addressing systemic racism across state government. The idea was, well, do we need that office and another Bureau that's gonna be doing some of the same stuff, but with a specific focus towards the criminal and juvenile justice systems or should Susanna's office just be given the people, the money and the tools needed to do that job as well? And if the decision is, yeah, let's just beef up Susanna's office and give it what it needs to get this job done, then, you know, there'd be two options. Just leave it as that as the charge for her office or one of the charges for her office and give her the staff to do it or theoretically, although I think this might be a lot of bureaucracy, you could do that and then create within her department an office or a Bureau to do this and add another layer to it. I did not decide to add that other layer to it. I just said, you know, let, you know, just let her beef up her office, elevate it to a department, make her a commissioner and let them run with this. Susanna? Yeah, I should have said this a long time ago, but as much as possible, I am gonna encourage us to talk about this not using terms like she, her and Susanna because who knows, maybe I'm not the right guy for it, but that shouldn't taint our view of the proposal itself. So you can talk about me like I'm not here. I won't be upset. Got it. So, which did you have other questions you wanted to ask, Evan? Cause I also had a bunch of things I wanted to say. Great. I have other questions, but I think you should go and I'll just see if mine don't get answered. Okay. So thanks, Evan, for doing this because this is the critical next stage that we need to get to, which is proposed and draft legislation no matter what. I think I've made this point before, but I'll make it again in terms of modeling any of the membership of the governing board or advisory body on the council criminal justice training, and I'm probably got the name wrong, is really problematic from a perspective of representing people who are in these criminal court systems. It's already a slanted, unbalanced makeup body. As you can see, even before you added all the, the defender general's office. Thank you, Evan, for at least including that. I tried to do what I could. It is very law enforcement heavy, right? And not community centric, not lived experience centric. I think if you were to sort of map out where we could expect predicted lines to fall, I think that, you know, however we want to think about and check what is balanced, what we mean by balanced, is it just, right, what do we mean? Maybe we're not on the same page as that, right? And from my perspective, this is not balanced because it is law enforcement heavy, public safety focused heavy, right? And so that's sort of a general response in terms of looking to that legislation for example. If I start at the beginning of your draft. Yeah, just tell me where you want me to scroll up. And while I'm, I'll say, I don't necessarily disagree with you on that point, Rebecca. I mean, I really think that the makeup of the council serves a different function than this entity. I just didn't want to like, not include the suggestion because it was made, but I agree that there could be concerns with following that model strictly. I just thought the toolkit from AISP in terms of who should you identify to be part of the decision-making body was an interesting exercise and certainly informs my look, you know, Hulia, I realized you may not know what we're talking about. It was a toolkit that we sort of kicked off this summer's discussion and I'll send it to you. But in a nutshell, it was how to approach sort of designing a government body with sort of a racial equities perspective plan and data collection, right? It was a data collection entity specifically with a focus on racial equities throughout. All right, so that's one. The second was the discussion about the relationship of that body. However, it's made up to the head of the office, the commissioner, as you referenced here. Yeah, let's get to that point because there was another section too. I was just about to get to about that. And that fundamentally goes to how we see, again, sort of this oversight question, where we're grappling with the independence nature, right? I mean, we sort of have been focusing on the entity itself and how independent it is from perhaps the governor or other law enforcement or other sort of slants. This is a different type of independence that we should think about, which is keeping the commissioner, making sure the commissioner doesn't run the show, right? Like is this body a mere advisory body or is it a governing body? Does the commissioner take direction from the governing body or merely advice, which the commissioner can dismiss, right? Yeah, that's a good question. I think I have some language in there about that. And it's a good point for discussion, I think. I see section 2203, page two, line five. And this was, I mean- Okay, because there's this part two that makes it advisory, the committee shall advise the commissioner on the department's execution of duties assigned to it by basically all of the duties. It advise the commissioner on all of the duties, including but not limited to which questions to answer through the department's collection and analysis of data to determine the existence and scope of any racial disparities within state government. So I read that language as advise, not direct. Yeah. Right, so again, I just wanna share with this subcommittee. I think a critical check that we can build in in the design of this and independence and extra check is to have this be, the commissioner's responsibilities is directed by this body, right? The questions to be answered. I don't know if others agree or disagree, but maybe there was that as a general comment. So I just- I mean, I think my views are somewhat tainted honestly by seeing how the National Resources Board works in state government. I mean, it was a board of five individuals, only one of whom was paid anything more than the $50 per DM. And honestly, getting the other four board members to have a sufficient base of knowledge to be able to function effectively in managing that entity's execution of its statutory duties was a chore. Recruiting people, educating people, getting people to engage, could be difficult at sometimes given the structure. So I would say if the idea is that this panel is going to be running the show as opposed to advising someone on how to run the show, I think that the number of people that are going to be part of it needs to be evaluated. What are they going to be compensated for doing this? Because otherwise it might be very difficult to get them to be as functioning, as functional as we would like. Karen? Yeah, I think the conversation you're having right now is really important. And I'm wondering if it would be helpful one to put just a reference to the AISP tool, kit in here somewhere, so we don't lose that piece. Because I think that's really important work that's already been done and to relook at that and make sure we contemplate what they have suggested. And I just think the other conversation is really important. It should be brought to the larger team around advisor direct. Okay. Yeah, the one thing I did do, and I think there could be a way to make them more of a directive body than advisory body. I just think there's a lot more questions that would have to be answered to make that happen. One thing I did try and do was at least make it clear that this committee would advise the commissioner on all of the department statutory duties, not having been around when the office of racial equity was first created or the executive director of racial equity was first created, it was interesting to me that it seemed as though the existing panel's role was limited to only a subset of the department's duties. So I tried to broaden it a little bit, not knowing if there was like a good reason for limiting it initially. You know, that brings me to sort of another overall comment I wanted to share with everyone, which is sort of this tendency to be like, oh, this is a great place or opportunity to throw in an extra duty on this commissioner to address racism in the system. And I'm sensitive to Susanna's sort of comments throughout, which is the way one person can be like, I mean, the sole job, but the other, which is that the tasks of this statistical center, that's particularly if it scales up beyond racial equities, to make sure it matters, I feel like we should keep a very, very clean, devoted purpose and sole mandate is just this, right? And I understand the concerns that I'm hearing, which is you're inviting repetition, overlap, exhaustion of the same players being involved. If you don't use this to replace others. And I think my response to that is, so we're going to Evan's point, which is if we commit to a governing body, we should commit to funding it appropriately and bringing in the appropriate expertise to compensate and bringing in a particular type of skill level. So I don't necessarily think there's quite the overlap in terms of if we keep it purely focused on data. And the other is that by keeping it just focused on data collection aggregation, reporting analysis, we elevate the whole business itself. And so I just wanted, because this is written as if it is just focused on racial equities and not scalable up. And I increasingly see this as an entity dedicated to data aggregation collection review. Julio? Yeah, I guess, I mean, the point you raised is a question that I've had because I haven't been part of these discussions, which is whether this is really envision as an entity that's designed to collect, analyze, and disseminate data in the same way as say the US Bureau of Labor Statistics does, which it doesn't get involved in either labor enforcement or policy or the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which just provides different ways to slice data and to look at data for whatever questions are presented to BJS, which doesn't have any connection with enforcement, you know, like grants from the different offices and DOJ or enforcement. That's pretty much a technical kind of technocratic function that, you know, does the crunching for whatever, for whoever decides, you know, like what they want to look at and then does that assignment. But that's what I, when I looked at the draft report, I thought that's what it looked like to me, but it also, there's also part of the mandate that says, you know, that asks our DAP to define scope of duty. So I guess the legislature wasn't thinking it was ironclad, but yeah, I think that's a good point. It's sort of like two different points, I think that you and Rebecca have raised, you know, I think Rebecca, one point that Rebecca raised is, okay, do we want, and this is something we have talked about in previous meetings, like should this entity be restricted to just collecting data that might show disparities based on race, or do we want to set it up to do that initially with the understanding that it could be flexible enough to collect data on disparities based on gender, national origin, or any other protected class that we might be interested in exploring. So that's sort of the one question. And then the second, and I don't think the task, I think to our DAP, and it was really restricted to race. We sort of asked that question on our own, I think. The question that you're asking, I think I assumed that the legislature expected us to answer that a little bit. And, you know, I think that, you know, I think one thing that we're gonna have to consider at some point is if we establish this entity as a pure data collection entity that stands separate and apart from Susanna's, or the office of the executive director of racial equity, if it stands outside that office, then what do we do with the fact that that office is already supposed to be collecting data related to race across state government? Does that mean then that we need to amend that existing enabling legislation to make it clear that that's no longer its responsibility that it's supposed to collect data regarding race across state government, except for in the criminal and juvenile justice context, because someone else is already on top of that now? That's sort of like a big lingering question, I think. You know, and then are you really staffing up two different offices to do the same types of data collection, but on a slightly different topic? That's another question I think we'd have to ask. Well, I think the statute says managing and overseeing the statewide collection that that's part of, you know, that was in the original statute. And well, it says collection. It doesn't actually say analysis of the data. I mean, like the very to me kind of rubber hits the road brass tacks, whatever image you want to use for this is that someone's going to be asking a state agency to provide data that may not exist and readily accessible databases. That's going to be voluminous and time consuming and may require substantial resources to de-identify the data that might be protected by state or federal law. And so someone, you know, someone who is going to have to navigate that, which is different than inputting the data and starting to create models to try to isolate different sources or, you know, test different statistical hypotheses about things like student discipline and so forth. So I don't know that there's necessarily a different, you know, like duplication. I'll give you an example, just one thing that I'm familiar with and I'm not saying this is representative, but it's just something that I am familiar with that might be illustrative. The Bureau of Justice Statistics puts out a national crime victim survey report. The data is actually collected by the US Census Bureau, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics is involved in asking census what questions to ask and for what periods and at what level of specificity. But really that, you know, the ground workers and the statisticians at the Census Bureau are the one who take that order and then go fulfill it and then provide raw data sets to BJS which has its own PhD statisticians that start testing different ways to report on trends and different sorts of responses to surveys of people who've reported being victims of crimes. So there is, I think there's a kind of a separation between ordering the data and then folks who are empowered to do that. And they're different. I think one chat and also just to step back a little bit. And again, this is mostly, my perspective as a non-participant, but the other meeting that I'm not attending right now that I was invited to was the one that State Police, Spheron and Partial Policing Committee has relating to traffic stop data and I haven't been involved in any of those reports. But I've seen those reports go out in a lot of different states. And part of the challenge or the debate or divisiveness that can occur in debate about traffic stop reports or reports about in some jurisdictions use of force is that whoever is doing the study, whether it's a university or whether it's a group like Citizens for American Progress that they began the study with a conclusion already set in their mind. And then they designed the study where they, in blood terms, cook the numbers to come out to an outcome. So I think there is some benefit to having at least some unit that is sort of insulated even within its own mission from having views as part of their job description about policy decisions but identifying gaps, disparities, trends and not be not those technicians be involved in the policy formulation. They're sort of serving up the information for your people who are tasked with policy to do that. But they're often, they can be within the same agency. They just have to be sort of firmly separated by mission so that it protects those employees that they understand in their role. So there is some benefit to having at least some level of specificity about the people who are gonna do the data analysis maybe. Karen? Yeah, I'm hoping part of what I'm hearing and I'm hoping I'm hearing it. Hope I'm understanding what Julio was saying is that there's the, and I just wanna actually update him a little bit on what we've done in the past is this governing body for the policy issues which is one of the things I was heard him talking about. And then this whole idea of the mechanics of getting the data and making sure it's the right data and knowing how to access the data and get the data to a place where someone can de-identify the data and serve it up to those folks who are going to be analyzing it. And we have had some of those conversations, Julio, about those being two different bodies. So there's the policy body which is a really important set of people to help define the parameters of what's gonna be studied and come up with the research questions. And then there's this, what I like to call the nuts and bolts committee because it's a really technical committee that has to work with, we've talked about the execs in the departments who are gonna be supplying the data so that they can give the authority for people to hand the data over whatever's available and easy to access to start with. So start small and build up. And then also the IT folks in those departments because they're the people that know how to get the data out of the systems and then working with ADS because they're gonna be the ones that are gonna know how to de-identify the data. And that's where a lot of the executive branch data has to go through anyways. They have certain parameters and guidelines and rules and regulations and the privacy and confidentiality and security regs that they have to deal with. And so we've talked about having a separate body and we were calling it a governing body too but it's a body, we call it the infrastructure governing body to actually be the folks that work on the nuts and bolts. We had Mo West from search who is the national data sharing entity for criminal justice data. Come and talk to the group early on and talk about his experiences in other states, creating these bodies and creating the infrastructure and the data sharing pieces to fit together. So we're waiting to hear because we're working with another group called NCJRP, the National Criminal Justice Reform Project who has some funding to engage ADS in hiring a project manager to help coordinate that other body of work to get the data to this policy entity and to the new office of whatever we're gonna be calling it the data analysis office. So we're kind of separating the workout, the policy work and the nuts and bolts work and we're working on getting that together. We should be hearing, I thought I would hear last week about whether we got the funding for ADS and the person would actually work for DPS but pulling together. I'm sorry, I was really talking about when I talked about navigating information collection from a little bit different perspective. Okay. Which is simply that, I mean you do need those IT professionals and everybody period even when everyone's cooperative but maybe because I work in the conflict business I can anticipate that some people will not be as cooperative notwithstanding they may work for the same governor or that they may seek to, I mean there are many fields of data that might shed light on disparities that where the information isn't just kept in a database where you can run gender and race but rather it might be embodied in narratives where you have names and addresses and it's a point that when the initial statute came up it was a question that I raised that I don't think the legislature actually ever answered and so far and I don't know that it hasn't come up because the deep dig hasn't really begun yet at least as far as I know but like what if one agency says your records request is too broad and we're not gonna do it or we think federal law prevents us from providing it. The question I asked back when the original bill was before the legislature was who's the lawyer for the director because the state agencies will want the AG's office to represent them so who's their lawyer if disputes arise and so really I was talking more about navigating the shoals of government as opposed to all of the technical details because I agree with you that's those sorts of working groups are common in other types of data collection and are a little bit different. Well, I'm sorry I didn't get through the rest of that walk through on the RDAF report because we sort of quickly went into section one but as Karen talked about the nuts in both section and focusing on how the how to actually do this rubber hits the road was actually a task question from the legislature pulled out in Roman numeral five, page six and in there is sort of our start of it including the diagrams that Karen and Monica and others have been talking about and as far as I could see Evan that piece of it is not in the proposed legislation you talked about and you already flag the fact that Julio's last point which is how are you gonna make sure this works again that's Roman numeral six of our report because that's a specific question the legislature tasked us to separately review and Julio we haven't gotten there yet we very broadly sort of talked about the need to have an enforcement mechanism and to share and thanks Evan for confirming it's not in there. I think we talked about models in current legislation relating to what is it? Is it traffic stop data? Is it about tied to funding? But there were other concerns and specific suggestions relating to subpoena powers or how to make sure agreements data sharing and I think Monica and Karen have both talked about this and Robin ensuring compliance with getting individual agencies to just agree to this stuff, how to enforce it. So yeah, no, we're all on the same page we just haven't gotten to that part and you'll see on page seven of that report that it's left blank. And I absolutely did not attempt to answer that question because I have no idea what the answer might be. I imagine that some, I mean, I hope not but I agree it's possible some entities that might have to be reporting data might not play nice with others and that would be unfortunate and there should be a mechanism for addressing that but I don't know what it is. My sincere hope is that a lot of resistance is gonna be generated just by the overwhelming task of trying to figure out how to parse through like one of the big things I keep thinking about is is there gonna be an expectation for the department of state's attorneys and sheriffs to report out any data to this entity? Because if so, I have concerns that we don't presently have the ability to do that. So I think that there needs to be an understanding and an expectation that even after this entity is created this entity and the legislature might have to provide some support to the reporting entities so that they can get geared up to do this reporting and do it reliably and they don't muck it up. So I think there's gonna be an education and an assistance component to this entity in addition to just the collecting and analyzing component. So I avoided those questions. We've also approached this concern in a different way. I just wanna remind everybody in terms of our first report or our report last year identified all of the potential data collection points, the discretionary decisions that are made in the criminal juvenile justice systems and there were plenty. And then we prioritized within that group and that list was still plenty. And at least my informal consults with people who do this stuff for a living and then the AISP toolkit again, suggested first goals out the gate, to get the low hanging fruit, the stuff that's publicly available. The Connecticut folks who talked to us suggest that too, like focus on what's available and target that to start that slow build. So that was implicit in terms of our section where we get to discussing the mission and scope and responsibilities of the governing board. And that's earlier on. And I haven't quite gotten all the way there yet, but so in my, what I tried to do was say, okay, the governing board that we've been contemplating will become a newly constituted committee, the former panel. The panel used to have a limited set of enumerated duties. I changed it to, and we can, again, the conversation about advisory versus directive, but to encapsulate basically advice on the entirety of the work of the entity. And then there were some changes to that as well. So the way that the existing enabling legislation is set up is the panel has its own section that deals with what its duties are and then the executive director has a different section with the separate duties. So I have, I've made some changes there as well, making it clear that it's not just agencies and departments within the executive branch, but it's all branches of state government, including the judiciary and the general assembly. And then they use the work, I mean, I don't know, combat's probably a fine word, but I wanted to try and work in this concept of really identifying as well, because that seems like one of the major components of the data collection is, let's figure out where this problem exists so that we can eradicate it more effectively. And then, this was my attempt to provide some room for growth by saying it doesn't necessarily have to be restricted to race-based data. It could be, it could try and leave some room to grow in case we wanted to explore other protected categories. And then, yeah, this was my attempt to not being a data collection guy myself and not knowing how this entity should be collecting data, but at the same time recognizing that some transparency might be desirable. Say, this newly constituted department, you are going to adopt rules or procedures in accordance with the Administrative Procedures Act that spells out how you're gonna collect this data, how you're gonna analyze it, and how you're gonna share it. Consistent with section 504 is the existing confidentiality provisions related to the Office of the Equity Director. So I just wanted to make sure we do have to worry about that as well. This is potentially some sensitive data while we want some transparency, we also don't want to unnecessarily invade people's privacy. And then this is where I selfishly tried to guard my own department a little bit because I'm concerned that we're gonna get hit with an ask and we're not gonna have the ability to fulfill it. So, I threw in there that this newly constituted department should provide some technical assistance to the entities that it expects to be receiving data from. Maybe that'll hopefully create some buy-in as well. Let's see. These are just minor changes, changing things like director to department. Oh, yes. And then, yes, this is just a highlight also that the department's gonna have to work with agencies and departments to help it in the data collection process because I could envision some of them struggling with that. Oh. Kalia, Jeff earlier, was there a question before we get too far away from that? I just wanted to say for the topic about like these difficulties in data collection, it really is a theoretical. In 2018, Baltimore spent about a year and a half struggling with their, they have an office of independent review of their law enforcement that requested records that are held by the police department. They have subpoena authority under the city authority, but they were also represented by the state solicitors office, which also represents the police department. And the police department went to the same solicitors office and said, we want the people requesting the data to sign confidentiality agreements, which the independent civilian review entity didn't want to do. So it was kind of two competing agencies, one law firm. And so it took about a year plus for them to work it out, but it created a lot of headache. And so I'm just saying it's not theoretical that the solicitor, in that case, was a retired Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge. So certainly someone who was very capable, but because they didn't anticipate those tensions or they had historically not had the tensions until that civilian entity started actually exercising their authority. And then it got real and they had a problem right away. So I don't think it's theoretical because questions are not just burden, but I also think, again, confidentiality, whether they can, because who knows what the data requests are going to be, that's up to the imagination of those experts. And so I think it's not just a lawyer question, but also like a leadership question about making decisions about, when not to fight it out in court or how to work those things out. So my point was that it's not theoretical. No, no, I'm sorry. Subpoena authority, subpoenas are not self-enforcing. You can just write a letter and then object to the subpoena and then you have to go to court to enforce it. Coolio, so many of our previous meetings have explored your concerns. And in fact, not just on that issue, but any subpart of the Roman numerals we've been asked to provide. It has been a point made. It's a huge, not to dismiss what you're saying. In fact, what I was going to, because I know you're not falling on deaf ears. We are all in agreement in terms of the enormity of the challenges. The question to you, because I love that you're able to point to all these actual examples of problems. Do you have proposals, solutions, anything to add to this than given your insight and experience? Because that's, that is anything we can do. Well, I mean, what happened in Baltimore was that the way it was resolved was that the city council increased the budget for the entity so that they can hire a higher private council. Well, I was just going to talk about that because I think one of the things that is, I hope doesn't become too problematic is the fiscal analysis of this proposal. How many entities are going to be expected to report data that are going to need an appropriation so that they can update and or replace any software that they're using so that they can keep track of this data in the event that they get one of these requests? I mean, how many entities are we talking about that may need to do that kind of thing and what's the dollar figures that that would entail? So I actually had forgotten about this one change that I made, which kind of gets to this because I was thinking to myself, okay, well, we have this whole panel and what if they advise the department on something and the department says, well, thank you very much, but I don't really, you know, I'm not going to pay attention to that piece of advice, right? So it sort of gets to Rebecca's point about advising versus directing. And so, you know, what I, you know, I added something here where in the reporting requirement that currently exists for the director of racial equity to add in that, you know, when you issue these reports, you need to explain how it is that your department considered advice provided by the committee. That way it's at least hopefully more transparent when they did or did not follow the advice and why and then policy makers, including the legislature can decide if, you know, they need to make some tweaks as a result of that. This is mostly just, I just relocated this, but it's, you know, the annual report contents of what the duties are. Yeah, and then this is the existing provision regarding confidentiality. I only updated the terminology, but I didn't really change it. So it is what it is right now and I know that we're going to have to deal with confidentiality and things like de-identification. I don't have the answers to those. So I just included this as a placeholder where the terminology has changed with the expectation that we're going to have to review that at some point. And then we already talked about this a little bit, but this is the last provision just deals with the appointment process. And I tried to already flag, just please keep in mind that it does differ a little bit from the appointment process or other positions within the agency of administration. And I think folks just have to decide what they're more comfortable with. That's all I got. Sorry, sorry. My apologies if it took so long. No, it actually, it was a way for us to get to a lot of these issues that we're trying to do. So it's great. And really thank you for doing all that effort taking this and it's one thing to talk the idea as it's another to actually propose the actual language, right? And this is a good start. Even if it reveals it's a bad idea, right? Then we know, you know, I mean, honestly, I really just wanted to try and get something for people to look at, to move the conversation forward. So. So I think Tone was hoping we could, well, I don't know. I mean, to me, this is a great start. You know, it's way too early to sort of say, because what you raised were so many sub-issues that as Karen, you suggested we should really, we should take to the panel. In fact, sort of my takeaway from tonight is highlighting a lot of these fundamental questions that were raised tonight that we've been grappling with throughout the past few weeks to sort of, we need some decision points by the full panel. There's to extend through some agreement. Is that fair? Is that fair where we're at with this? I think that that's fair. I did not envision the working group voting on anything. I sort of envisioned us coming up with a sort of menu of options or possible recommendations for the full RDAAP to vote on. And honestly, I think that's even potentially true with the RDAAP report. I mean, we may have all the answers and we may agree on a path forward, but we might also be providing general recommendations and a menu of options for the legislature to consider. And I don't think that's falling down on the ask to us. I think that would be an acceptable path forward. But hopefully we come up with a solution to all of this, but I think we should be prepared that that might not be possible. And it might be just outlining a couple of different ways in which this could happen and maybe the pros and cons and let the legislature decide. Which? Yeah, I think a lot of, I think there were a lot of pros and cons, I think for what Evan proposed and the alternative of just having it be its own office. And I think that the idea of here are different options that we've come up with. Here's some benefits and drawbacks to each of them. I think we should come up with that draft and presented to the bigger RDAAP group. Because I think maybe at this point we would just keep going around in a circle amongst ourselves. Yeah, I agree. Tomorrow is the meeting, right? Is that, and then the next month is October. Should our suggestion be, I mean, it does feel like we could identify some of these points, but perhaps we have more agreement than not on some of the others. I don't know. Elizabeth, do you have something to share? You look like you're about to know. No, I had just just eating before, so I had my camera off, that's all. Thank you though. And I already gave a heads up to Atom, but I'll flag it for the folks on this group. I actually can't make it tomorrow night. My apologies for that. I'm just not able to do it tomorrow. Well, so perhaps like it makes sense, like tomorrow like Atom's agenda is to sort of have us go around and speak about what has been happening. And maybe that's our point that we'll come back in for October's monthly with our list of specific asks after we've had another, well, not that many more, but I guess four more weeks, three more weeks to sort of work through this list together of agreement, not agreement panel. Let us know what you think, yeah. Okay. Good, does anyone else have anything? Oh, Ian. Yeah, just for the benefit of Atom, I'm gonna discuss this with afterwards. For action items, we mostly then just have discussing various questions with the larger ARDAP group tomorrow. Is anybody else going to, is anybody going to be revising draft documentation or anything? I am not. My understanding is that we were gonna come up with a list of questions to ask for the panel for next month, but tomorrow perhaps we could all, Evan, you could walk through and explain what you've been sharing with us. Karen or Monica can talk about the nuts and bolts plan. Everyone can chime in in terms of where they want to sort of share with the group where we are now without, I don't think, it sounds like we're too early to ask the panel to vote on anything for tomorrow. Is that right? Ian, does that help you for your action points for Atom? All right, you're not there. Well, let us know if you can tell Atom. Sorry, I used to zoom the keyboard shortcuts are different. Yes, that does help. Thank you so much. All right. All right, guys. Anything else we should talk about? We'll see you tomorrow night. All right, thank you. Thanks, Rebecca. Have a good night, everyone. Good night, everybody.