 1820s and 1830s, there were attempts made to reapportion the legislature back then because people felt it wasn't fair and it was not sufficiently based upon population. Nothing ever happened, however, until the early 1960s, 140 years later when the some court decisions were made that said, yeah, that isn't fair. There isn't equal voting access in Vermont because of the one representative per town structure of the house in particular. And what you had and maybe the most stark way to illustrate that is that the town of Stratton had 38 people and one member of the Vermont House. And Burlington had over 35,000 people and had one member of the house. After that litigation, the dust cleared in the early to mid 1960s, the legislature reapportioned itself and established the apportionment board to come into being and start working every 10 years, about 18 months prior to when the legislature had to do its own final version of a new map. So the apportionment board has met about five or six times now. Every 10 years and we are, in a sense, advisory to the legislature. But we take that role very seriously and we'll be trying to provide the legislature with as much data and research and redistricting options as we can. But we have to redraw the lines every 10 years almost no matter what happens to the state population because the state's population tends to shift within the state. And if you've been following the internal population shift trends, those have been steady for 20, 30, 40 years. Now we have another 10 years worth of that trend. And it shows that the population in the southern part of the state and the maybe Southwest Central, Bennington, Wyndham and Rutland counties, is continuing to gradually lose population. And the northwest corner, Franklin, Lamoille and Chittenden predominantly, are gaining population. And when you have, I mean, in an ideal world, you would want each house and each Senate district to have the same number of people as each other ones, which means there's equality of representation. The law has said that the courts have said that doesn't have to be mathematically exactly equal, but it has to be substantially equal. And you have to make a sincere effort to make it as substantially equal as you can. At the same time, the Vermont law in this area says you should also try to have the legislative districts follow town boundaries and county boundaries. And you should do your very best not to subdivide towns and put them in different districts. Those end up being competing or colliding mandates. And it would be one thing if you said, well, we have 650,000 people in the state. We have 150 house members. We'll just use a computer program of sorts to create 150 house districts that are almost identical in population. And people have actually, we've done that as an exercise. But there's no very little resemblance to a state of Vermont map showing the towns. And there's a belief in Vermont that keeping the towns distinct within legislative districts is a good thing because it gives a legislative district some cohesion and the people in that legislative district share things in common. Not just who their legislative representatives. They may share a school district. They may share other relationships, commercial relationships. And maybe in the old days, they all went to the same market. But in many cases, they're also been in the same house district for a long time, and they're comfortable and accustomed to being joined with one or two other towns in that district, and they identify that way. So those are, Lauren Glenn, some competing mandates we have. But the one that Trumps that comes out on top under the law is the substantial equality of population. Because if you in the Stratton Burlington case from 1964, in a sense, in an important sense, the people of Stratton compared to the people of Burlington, the Stratton folks were way over represented. They had one house member for 38 people. And in Burlington, the residents were grossly underrepresented. And that's what we have to keep reminding ourselves. We have to avoid something that's stark. It's very unusual to have Senate districts with even three people serving at large. Vermont is the only one that currently has a six member at large district. And something can be said in favor of smaller districts as promoting better communication between the elected representative and the people being represented. And fundamentally, the problems that were encountered with a six member at large district were instead of representing 21 or 22,000 people, you were representing 140,000 people. And it also made campaigning for many people very expensive and very difficult. It gave great weight or power to name recognition or to incumbents. For that same reason and it's slowly but surely over the last 10 or 12 years, I think even the incumbent senators in the Chittenden Senate district came around to thinking, this is really too much. And in 2019, the legislature agreed and amended the law to say that you can't have a Senate district with more than three members at large. So in doing this redistricting work, this time around, we are looking at at least reducing that to two, three member districts. But we are also looking at other subdivision options, you know, all the way from six one member districts to three twos or some other combination. One of the problems we've encountered is that the US Census Bureau was under federal law was supposed to deliver us and the other states of final census numbers by March 31. This spring, we still don't have that. And now we've been we've been told August 15. It's going to be when we get the final numbers. But we do have some reasonable population estimates that are 2019 estimates. And we have been using those just to get our feet underneath us and to look at the districts that are likely to have need the most attention. And briefly, the methodology that the board uses is to establish what the ideal sized district is. And we'll talk about we can talk about the House ideal now, which is around forty two hundred people. We then look at the actual, in this case so far, the estimated population and we drop all those numbers together into a map of the Vermont House districts. And that tells us for each district, a percentage greater or less than the ideal for the population of that House district. And what the law says is that you should look at the House district with the highest positive deviation over their ideal number and compare it to the district with the greatest negative deviation from the ideal. And then you look at the spread between those two districts. And that's what's called the overall deviation for the entire map. And the law says that number should be reasonably tight. The courts have never, the courts have been careful to not micromanage this process because at some fundamental level, it has a political tinge to it. And the courts rightly try to stay out of the political arena. But something approaching the high teens for an overall deviation, for example, where you had a House district with a minus eight and a half or nine deviation, meaning that they have eight and a half percent fewer people than the ideal and a House district with an eight and a half or nine percent on the high end, creating a deviation of maybe 18 points. That's sort of pushing it. It's worth noting that the map that the legislature approved in 2012, the House overall deviation is 18.9 percent. So we have but no one challenged that in court. So it became the law and that's what we have now. But using the estimated census data, we've identified House and Senate districts that look like their percentage deviations are such that they need are going to need some adjustment. We will be issuing a an initial house map, sort of a preliminary house map and sending it out to all the towns, publishing it on our on our website and all of that. And a town that disagrees with how it's been placed in a district, particularly a town that we propose to subdivide or to put into a two member district. Those towns have the right to hold a public hearing, take testimony and then send us a counter proposal or criticisms of our initial mapping proposal. All those comments will be coming back to us from the the boards of civil authority in each town and the board of civil authority in each town is the select board members and the justices of the piece, plus the town clerk and that unit of government is chosen in large part because in towns that's the board of civil authority that has a sort of oversight authority over local elections. And they have some local expertise in that regard. We've asked the public, do you have a preference in general over a single member house district versus a two member house district? And do you feel strongly about the importance of following town lines and keeping towns intact? Do you prefer single member Senate districts? Should we go to all single member Senate districts, for example? And the the apportionment board did a version of that 10 years ago just to see what it would look like. And it doesn't look at all like a county map, no, no, no surprise. Interestingly, in Vermont, while we have this statute that talks about trying to preserve county lines, our county government in Vermont, our counties don't have much governance, value, or meaning in Vermont. But nevertheless, people identify with the county they're in. And when will you file your proposal with the legislature? Well, we were under our our statute. We're supposed to get all of this stuff done by the end of July. But the since the US Census Bureau has failed to send us the data that we need, the legislature enacted some changes that pushed this out into the late summer and into the fall. So if I had to make a estimate of when we would be getting this map out to the towns, I would say sometime in the middle to the end of September. Well, let's be in touch when those maps are drawn so that we can generate some more interest. And in the meantime, I really appreciate your time and the work of the apportionment board, the legislative apportionment board, in making sure that we get the kind of representation that we deserve in the state of Vermont. You got it. My pleasure. Thank you, Tom Little. Bye bye. Bye.