 Right, so this is Wednesday, January 26th, I believe, and this is Senate government operations. Today we're going to do a couple of things. We're gonna hear about the governor's executive order. I don't remember the number, but it deals with the Agency of Public Safety. We're also going to hear some reports from the Criminal Justice Council. And that's the first part of our meeting. So I just will mention a couple ground rules that we have. I'm not gonna go through the whole litany of them, but I do ask that people not use the chat function. In my mind, the chat function is very akin to if we're in the room to people having side conversations. So we don't use the chat function. The only time it's used is if somebody refers to somebody to a study or a report or something and provides Gail with a link, then she will post it on there. And then afterwards she will post it on our website as one of the documents received. So with that, what I'd like to do is I guess go to, we have a number of people with us today and what I'd like to do is go to Commissioner Shirling. I guess you are first on the list here to present the executive order to us, right? Yes, that's your discretion, Madam Chair. And I believe before we start, there has been some confusion around it, around the constitutionality of it and about whether both bodies have to turn it down, but the statute clearly says that if either body does not accept it, then it doesn't go into effect. So that's what we're operating under. Understood, I have no position on the process. I'm here to discuss the merits with you. And that is what we mainly are going to do also and look at what in here is likeable and what isn't likeable and where we should go. And I will just say for people's benefit that I have introduced twice, at least twice in the past, a similar bill, not the same, not this exact structure, but something similar to create an agency. And if anybody is out there watching, today we're going to run through it. We're going to have committee questions. We're going to find out what it really is, how it's structured, all of that. But we aren't going to take any testimony on it except questions from the committee. And then we'll set up a day when we can hear from many different people and groups who either support it or oppose it or have questions or whatever. So just so that people know that this is not the only time we'll be dealing with this. So with that commissioner, take it away. Thank you. It's good to be with you again. My plan is to do as much depth as you'd like, but for probably 20 minutes or so to begin, walk you through what it is, what it isn't. And some of the history, I think many of the committee members who were here last year will remember our discussion on overall modernization strategy. And actually, let me back up just a second. I just a few minutes ago sent a slide deck and a document that I intended to send yesterday when I sent it to the house as we testified yesterday and I neglected to copy Gail. So she has it now. So sorry, it is late, but everything I'm going to say is somewhere embedded in those two documents as well. The slide deck is where I'm going to start. And what that outlines, you saw a version of it last January when we put forth our modernization plans in part in response to your original version of Vest's 124 centerway and the agency construct whether the one outlined in 124 or the version that we put forward last January were in response to 50 years, 51 years now of studies reports and analysis on the organization of public safety assets in Vermont. The key themes in all of those reports, whether they studied communications, they studied law enforcement, regionalized safety services more holistically including EMS and fire provision, they all fall into two categories. They're either recommending regionalized safety services which I'm not here to talk about today because those are municipal decisions or they are talking about the organization of the state's public safety assets often referring to an agency of public safety which is what I am here to talk with you about today. So it's been studied about 23 times. Many of those times have been initiated by the legislature. Some have been independent bodies such as the Grafton Conference and in a couple of instances it's been studied by the executive branch as well. In addition to that, there have been a number of bills introduced over the years, most recently the original version of S124 introduced in the Senate last year. Briefly, our overall modernization strategy which is embedded in that slide deck that I sent emphasizes a variety of things providing increased levels of support to public safety operations statewide and by extension, better public safety provision to Vermonters from one end of the state to the other simplifying the organization of assets and service delivery to ensure that our investments are going as far as possible, enhancing and modernizing training as the operating environment both in fire operations and law enforcement operations becomes increasingly complex over the years, developing a modern foundation for criminal justice data collection and data collection more broadly but with special emphasis on the criminal justice aspect of that to inform our efforts at equity and bias free operations but also to inform our overall strategies to determine what's working, what policy alterations and what operational alterations are necessary. And then in the background and bolted to all of this developing a statewide approach to criminal justice and public health a construct that looks to get at the root causes of some of crime and disorder and tries to improve outcomes by acting as early as possible in various processes to prevent people from having to enter the criminal justice system to prevent the need for enforcement, arrest, et cetera to the greatest extent possible. And all of those things form the fabric of the work that we have been working on partially distracted of course by the last 11 months of the COVID pandemic but certainly an enormous amount of work occurring in the background and together with the legislature over the last year. The agency model is a piece of this larger construct. If you have access to the slide deck on slide eight it gives the four buckets that I discussed with you last year the areas of focus to execute the things that I just outlined. First, modernizing the things that are internal to DPS our organization, our budgeting, our capital planning the alignment of our various efforts. Second to modernize the organization and alignment of state public safety assets that's where the agency comes in. Third to modernize the support of public safety operations throughout the state. So how we support in particular police and fire operations but by extension emergency medical service operations as well while they fall in the Department of Health there's a direct intersection of course to first response and to the communications assets and public safety answering points and things of that nature. And then finally that construct of a criminal justice and public health continuum, a unified system that works to get at better outcomes across the board is the last piece of that puzzle. And there's more detail on all of those both in this slide deck and in our modernization document that we put forth last January which you can find at dps.vermont.gov forward slash modernization. I'm gonna pivot now and skip through some of this deck. Again, it's presented to give you the context within which this is one piece of the overall modernization strategy. The agency has been proposed in one form or another since roughly the time I learned how to walk. The first study on regionalized services was actually the year before I was born. And it's been studied a variety of times since then. As we unpack these various reports as we talk with legislators over the last year and changed since November of 2019. And as we've talked with stakeholders some of them having been in public safety operations a lot longer than I have. A few themes have emerged around why previous explorations and efforts at the agency have failed and three stand out as the things that have gotten in the way previously. First, they have been in one way or another attempts to save money. This is not an attempt to save money. It is not an attempt to shave the number of people working in the various organizations that would come together to unify effort. If anything, it would set the stage for very mindful added investment in key areas like training but also in areas like information technology. But it would reduce the overall investment that's needed by unifying the effort. And we do believe that long-term it could flatten or it will flatten some of the cost curves as the efficiencies that would be gained by bolting together things that are very like-minded and work in an operational way very closely together. There's some advantages there. And I'll talk more about that as we get a little bit further into the details. The second fear was that these assets would become subservient to the Vermont State Police which is the largest component of the current Department of Public Safety. We have been very mindful about structuring this and the governor structuring the executive order to ensure that that does not happen. And again, I will go into the details of that in just a minute. And then finally, some of the prior models have suggested a fairly large, almost super agency with more complexity, larger bureaucracy, larger number of commissioners, et cetera. And we believe that there's been some fear that the larger it gets, the more bureaucratic it gets, the less efficient it is. So that has been a theme that we've uncovered as well. I'm gonna pause there for a second and just do a 30-second primer on the difference between an agency and a department, a commissioner and a secretary. And I wish it was clean cut and easy, but it's not, there are 12 cabinet level departments and agencies in the executive branch. Some of them are agencies and some of them are departments. An agency is led by a secretary and typically an agency has departments within it that are led by a commissioner, but not always. The agency of education, for example, has no sub-departments. A department, in terms of size, they're all over the map. The agency of commerce, where I came from previously, has three commissioners, but is far smaller than the department of public safety, which doesn't have a secretary, but has a department with divisions instead of being an agency with departments. There isn't a specific rhyme or reason other than to say that an agency has a secretary, a department has a commissioner and there are some cabinet level agencies and there are some cabinet level departments. So this has little to do with that, but in terms of just understanding the general phraseology, that's how it works. I should also start by saying this concept has broad support from key stakeholders at this stage whether that's VLCT, the various associations of the chiefs of police, sheriff's associations, the law enforcement advisory board, the immediately passed iteration of the Vermont criminal justice training council, Vermont criminal justice council, the new version has just begun to meet. They got a very brief introduction to this concept just last week, but they're just getting organized at this point, so they have not weighed in one way or another. Although we do believe it has broad support from within the operations of the police academy itself, and I'll talk more about why that may be in just a moment as well. On the house side, Madam Chair, they wanted me to differentiate between the current department structure and what the agency structure would be. Do you want me to take some time to do the current department structure? Would you like me to skip over that? Would you like to hear the current? Okay, yeah, I guess that's a yes. Okay, the agency is set up by divisions and there are a number of them. There's the division of the Vermont State Police, which is led by, divisions are led by a director. In the case of the state police, the director also has the title of colonel. There is a division of administration, which is led by Rick Hallenbeck. They do all the budgeting and all the background support that makes everything function. The division of emergency management, led by director Bornemann. Division of fire safety, led by director DeRosier. The division of lab services, led by Dr. Conti. And then there are other components. We have our own radio technology services group and the Vermont Crime Information Center among others. The Crime Information Center has everything from the core law enforcement telecommunications systems, Vermont Crime Information Center, the sex offender registry and currently the marijuana registry are all embedded there. And in the radio technology services group, it's a technical group that runs almost all of the state's radio frequency, hand-to-hand radio infrastructure, all the towers that go with that, microwave backhaul systems that go with that and even they run a small telephone company as well. Not one that sells service, but they run telephone systems, not only for the Department of Public Safety, but for other assets in state government as well. And that will make, that will come back into play in a moment as we talk about the future potential structure. So those are the pieces of the existing puzzle. There are just a few alterations to that structure that are envisioned in this first phase of setting up the agency model and creating that framework. So under the agency as drafted, we would move to having two departments and a division. The two departments would be the Department of Fire Safety and Emergency Management. That would be largely unchanged, although we would add some additional executive support with a commissioner of fire safety and emergency management. And I can't overstress how useful it would be just to have, these constructs have just a couple of additional positions in them, two commissioners in particular, and the advantages to having just a couple of more executives given the just indescribable workload that is in play now, and even prior to the pandemic would be helpful without creating significant cascading additional bureaucracy. The second department would be the Department of Law Enforcement that as initially constructed would have the division of the state police and a division of enforcement with the sworn motor vehicle staff coming into the agency of public safety. Those two directors would be independent of one another and the statutory mission and charge and all of the federal components, motor carrier safety and all of the things that the enforcement team does in the Department of Motor Vehicles would remain intact. And I'll get to some of the advantages to, while the missions would stay the same, the separation of services would stay the same, there are some significant advantages to beginning to bring some of those operational assets that are similar under one roof in just a couple of minutes. Finally, there'd be a division of support services which would be led by the deputy secretary. This is set up very mindfully to ensure that things like communications and other components that have historically been feared to have been subsumed by the state police as the largest component of the current department, what would still be the largest division within the agency to ensure that that doesn't happen because in the hierarchy, the deputy secretary would outrank the commissioners that are running the Department of Fire Safety and Emergency Management and the Department of Law Enforcement. So it was a very mindful selection of that particular organizational structure to ensure that things run the way we want and to avoid issues. So getting into the detail, so I already mentioned the first of the things that would be moved, there are a total of three things that would be moved. So the first thing would be the initial move of motor vehicle enforcement into the Department of Law Enforcement. And I'll just note that at the end of the executive order, it outlines the need to, I'll stop short of saying study again, but analyze the efficacy of whether it makes sense to move things like the warden service, formerly Fish and Wildlife Enforcement, liquor enforcement and or whether the legislature sees any benefit in attaching the Capitol Police to an agency. Obviously that's currently in a separate branch of government and that those things are set up as analyses for future assessment. In the division of support services under the deputy secretary, the administrative division would remain. There's a communications division that has currently, there are currently two of the three components that are already in the Department of Public Safety. So the first is radio technology services that I mentioned. The other is the public safety answering points, the two communication centers that the state runs, and they would come together with the E911 operations to form a communications division that we believe would have significant benefits of Vermonters in that the expertise around operating emergency communications platforms and technology would come together to leverage all of their knowledge and unify their effort to building the best possible communication systems for Vermont. It is not at all to subsume the E911 operations. And it should be noted that the executive order specifically spells out that the E911 board would retain its current statutory charge. And that's exactly what we had specced out back in January in our concept that we presented to you. And that is because the representative nature of that board, we believe continues to be essential because 911 operations do not just service at the moment the Department of Public Safety in the future potentially the agency of public safety but they service all Vermont communities and all Vermont first responders. And again, if you step back to the one of our overarching goals to provide better support to public safety operations statewide, this is a way to extend that support even further. And to bolt together the radio technology services group we think's gonna have great benefit as well. So example, as we look at making investments in the 911 system and the technology that supports the PSAPs and the technology that supports the RF communication, one of the visions is that we're not only looking at all of those things in totality but we're extending those conversations to our municipalities and saying, listen, we're looking at upgrading this radio system. What do you need in terms of upgrading your communications capability? Do you need a place to put another repeater for your frequencies on 150 foot tower that we own or that we're planning to relocate or to build? And having all of those things come together has the potential not only to unify the effort, streamline the strategy and save, make incremental savings in state government operations but it has the potential to have that same incremental savings and impact to statewide municipal costs in emergency operations as well. The next component of the sports services division is fleet services. It is now split between the state police and the other divisions of the Department of Public Safety. We would be incrementally unifying that operation. And obviously, if we were to take on the motor vehicle team as well, we would absorb the maintenance and care and feeding of their complicated vehicles and technology as well. The forensic lab division would remain unchanged. The Vermont Crime Information Center with all of its components would remain unchanged. And the final piece would be the training division which right now has the fire safety training council and the operations of the fire academy in its purview. And we would be replicating that model with the Vermont Police Academy and the Vermont Criminal Justice Council almost identically. The fire service training council currently guides is a multi-agency representative body that guides fire training and the Department of Public Safety provides all the budgeting administrative support to run the academy and execute the strategy that is created by that representative board. Exactly the same thing would happen with the Police Academy and the new Criminal Justice Council. Criminal Justice Council would retain its statutory charge to guide training as a representative body again because the training has to occur not only for the folks within the Department of Public Safety but for all law enforcement throughout the state. The new Criminal Justice Council also has increasing responsibilities for professional regulation. And we believe those should remain separate and again, representative with the 23 or so members that are on that council. But they would gain instead of having seven or eight or 10 employees in a $2 million budget they would gain all the support of an organization that has $130 million budget and 600 plus employees. Be almost 700 by the time we were done with these mergers if the legislature agrees with this process. So we see it as elevating and enhancing the work that could be done with the new Criminal Justice Council not as getting in the way of the sort of separate and distinct guiding operations that that council does. And we have a track record of achieving that through the Fire Service Training Council as well. That I can go through the timelines if you'd like in the deck, there's a number of sort of top line advantages. There are, I should note that one of the other things this isn't, it is not fixing any deficiency in the things that we're talking about bolting together. So DMV operations work well. Great team, there's nothing to change in terms of their operations. Same thing with the 911 board and the staff and the same thing with the academy. But they could use more support. And 911's got a budget deficit in talking with the interim director at the academy, Bill Sheetz and the new chair, Bill Surrell. They need more investment. And let's say for the sake of argument, I'm just gonna throw out a number. On their $2 million, let's say they need another $500,000 in investment. Well, it's a much bigger deal that bolt on another $500,000 to a $2 million budget than it is to find a creative way to do that against a $130 million budget. So making those investments and not inadvertently duplicating effort or duplicating investment is a potential advantage. Again, this is not a cost savings operation, but there's incremental costs that could be saved as a result of new investments that are really averted costs, I guess best described. Additionally, as we talked about in the overall modernization strategy, I mentioned it relative to the radio systems and the options there, but the same kinds of opportunities exist relative to the information technology, facilities, equipment, vehicles. We replicate these things over and over again. And what we're suggesting beginning the process of is to bring together components of state government that operate as closely as possible together and share those assets so that we're not replicating those things over and over again. I can go into more detail on examples of facilities, technology, equipment, and vehicles if you'd like, but I'll leave it there without, I don't wanna go too far into the weeds if you don't wanna go on the weeds. If you wanna go way in the weeds, I'm happy to do that as well. I have a canoe if necessary. No. That is, that's probably a good stopping point or pause point. There is the hazard and having been through this once before in 2017 in commerce, there are two criticisms typically of executive orders. They're either not detailed enough or they're too detailed. I can go either way. You tell me how much detail you want we have thought through and we really can't take the credit. This has been thought through my entire life. So what we're presenting is a modern version of things that have been contemplated for five decades. And this is as thorough as it gets. So I would ask the committee if they have any questions or comments, but in terms of, it's too detailed or it's not detailed enough. I think that what our job is, is to look at whether this is a good idea. And if it isn't a good idea, then what would we propose to make some of these changes without doing it this way? And if it is a good idea, how can we help shape the final product if that makes sense? This is being done through an executive order as opposed to a bill, which is the way it had been done before. And I'm looking at it and I don't know if the rest of the committee is or not, but I'm looking at this as kind of as if it was a bill and how do we make changes? How do we have influence? How do we have our voice heard here? So committee, I don't know where you are on that or if you have any questions or comments or concerns, Senator Collinmore and then Senator Rom. Thank you, Madam Chair. Michael, nice job setting it up. And I don't know whether this gets too deeply into the weeds or not, but I think I understand the difference between a department and an agency. You explained that very well. I'm curious though at the end of this, are there going to be more or fewer employees? And I'd like you to talk a little bit more about the attendant costs. You speak and I've been looking at some of the things that you submitted that a lot of the savings will come kind of like down the road, future savings, but there's no exact date by which this should happen. So it's going to either be less expensive or more expensive. And I know there's a lot on the pack there, but... No, great question. In the near term, it's slightly more expensive. We're talking about adding three employees, two commissioners and administrative support, one administrative support person for those two commissioners. And then long-term, again, it's not designed to be a cost-saving measure, but it's reasonable to expect that we will flatten some growth curves. So right now, let's say in the future, you've got the Department of Law Enforcement has three pieces and the legislature decides next year to bring the warden service in in 2023. Right now, every time we look at specialized vehicles, we look at radio technology or we look at information technology, we replicate it three times because they're in separate silos. And despite the fact that we can make efforts at unifying that by collaboration, there is nothing like having folks under one roof. You just don't get the same, you don't get the same level of collaboration. It may be good, but it's not great unless you've got people actually seated together. So that's why we think it'll be more beneficial to avoid some of those duplicative costs, still deliver exceptional service and maybe even step up that level of service. We do it right, but avoid some of the duplicative costs. Thank you. Senator Rom. Thanks. As you know, well, commissioner, there's no monolithic perspective within communities of color around policing. So I just want to start by saying that some of the social justice based organizations that I've heard from, I think necessarily worry about consolidation. It just can mean good or bad things if more public safety and law enforcement organizations are coordinating. For example, one thing you said is that, DMV is fine. I mean, obviously people who have drivers privilege cards who are non-citizens have had serious issues with feeling safe around people at the DMV in the past. So I just want to raise that as something to keep in mind. And two, I know you talked about data and training. I think so many folks in, I talked to Richmond yesterday, a lot of smaller municipalities and communities are really looking for support on how to engage in their fair and impartial policing work, how to even transition some of their resources towards broader public safety efforts than hiring more police. So I just wondered if you thought this new consolidated organization could tackle some of those things as well. Those are great questions, Senator. And directly on point, the next level of depth, if you will, that we haven't gotten to yet. So let me start by clarifying the DMV component. The Department of Motor Vehicles would still exist within the Agency of Transportation. All we're talking about moving is the sworn staff that does criminal investigation and highway enforcement. And in particular, one of their areas of focus is truck enforcement. The rest of DMV would still exist under the commissioner motor vehicles and the secretary of transportation. The part and parcel of this overall modernization strategy and one of the things we will be able to, we think we'll be able to do even better with the agency in play are two areas that you just hit on, whether that's training or data support. And we have put our money where our mouth is. We just signed a statewide computer aided dispatch and records management contract that for the first time has the state paying for that in its entirety, not nickel and diming the towns piece by piece. That system will have the capability to do more robust, more swift and more in-depth data analysis. And we've ever had available on a statewide basis before with a particular eye on our fair and impartial policing components of operations. And we anticipate being able to bring to bear the backend data analysis on a statewide basis rather than having each individual department have to worry about having to do that. When you've got five or six or seven or 10 or even 20 employees having either the budget or the staff to be able to do robust data analysis just often isn't in the cards. It's difficult to even an agency like Burlington which when I was there had 105 officers and 170 or so employees. So doing that on a statewide basis makes incredible sense and that's one of the things we're driving towards here and one of the things the agency would help with as well. And then relative to training, again the sort of same answer, different lane, providing the support to the operations of the academy with a 600, 650, 700 person agency behind it instead of having only seven or eight or 10 very talented employees, but limited resources may have, we believe will have a significant ability to enhance the scope and depth of training available to all agencies statewide. As it has with the fire service training is a great example of that. The fire academy and what director Lynch does there with a great team bolstered by specialists from around the state in the fire service is really an exceptional model and that's what we're trying to replicate here. Can I just add the only other thing I would add is recruiting and retaining a more diverse workforce in law enforcement. Yeah, it's also a great point and while we wouldn't have direct authority over that, this is one of the areas where we see the current department of public safety and in the future potentially the agency having a support role, a consulting role. We're building playbooks for lack of a better description right now around best practice in hiring police officers. A lot of agencies still are using them but there's nuances to the current operating environment that we think that sharing those will really help same thing for promotion and probably the most important one is a playbook for hiring chief executives in law enforcement. Without the leadership, it's impossible to do any of the things that I just described whether that's in an agency or it's in a small police department. So we're not, I wanna be really clear, we're working with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns on those and it is not the state or the department I guess in particular trying to do this to our partners but enable them to operate on the best possible playing field by giving them the playbook to work from, the best practice because it's so complicated. There's so many things that a law enforcement executive or a fire chief or an EMS chief has to worry about now that having support to help guide them to best practice without having to replicate. Is this the same duplication of effort kind of conversation? If we've got 70 police departments then they each have to spend two weeks a year worrying about how to update their hiring process and how to worry about succession planning for a chief of police when we can have a single playbook that they can work from that select boards could look to town managers and mayors can work from that's where we think this kind of modernization can really be helpful. Thanks, I think we'll hear some of that again when we go to the Mr. Sheets and Mr. Sorrell for the reports from the council itself. Any other questions, Senator Polina? You kind of touched on this a little bit a minute ago when you talked about 70 communities that have police coverage not wanting to be redundant and whatnot but I'm wondering how you would see local communities who now have no coverage and no police coverage, would they be benefiting or would they be in some way be better supported under this sort of structure? What does it mean to communities that right now lack any coverage at all? Would they be able to be easier access to coverage or just what's your take on that? Well, all communities have access to coverage it's just a question of which level. So for communities that either don't have their own departments or don't contract with another department or don't have an inter municipal agreement of some sort, the state police is their coverage. So that's 201 towns around Vermont. And the short answer is this will provide a level of incremental better service and better efficiency in particular around training around communications and things of that nature. Will it bolster the number of hours they have a trooper or police officer in their particular town? No, because this is not an effort at growing the size of the pie. It's about organizing the slices of the pie in the most efficient way possible. And I think, go ahead, Anthony. I hear you, I also had similar questions that Senator Rom had about data collection but you've already addressed those. And I think the question about the coverage and how that works is going to be a separate question whether it remains an agent, a department or becomes an agency. I think that's a huge question that we need to answer that we've been trying to grapple with for the last four years and we will continue that conversation also. Any more questions for the commissioner? Senator Collamore? Thank you, Madam Chair. So Michael, just to vet this a little bit more, does this not, and maybe it doesn't, but it seems like it could set up a situation where municipal law enforcement departments would be in a sense overseen or having to answer to the state police. And you mentioned this as one of the sort of pushbacks on this. I mean, both are full certified Vermont sworn police officers. Does this not set up a situation where the local folks are answering to people that they don't have to answer to right now? Great question. It's very mindfully constructed not to do that for in two ways. One, the components that do have oversight, if you will, over other agencies, whether it's oversight of training or oversight of professional standards, remain independent. That's the Vermont Criminal Justice Council. The other way that we bifurcate that is to have the assets within the agency that are working for all of those municipalities in the division of support services while the state police are in a department of law enforcement and the leader of the division of support services outranks the commissioner of law enforcement. Okay, thank you. Any more questions, Sork? And we will, I am not exactly sure of the process here. I have to figure this out. I know that we have until April 15th to actually decide whether we're going to accept or reject the executive order. But in terms of our input and if we have suggestions for changes or whatever, I'm not sure how that works if that has to be treated as a bill so that it would have to then go to the, be passed by us and go to the house. So in terms of just acceptance or rejection, we have until April 15th, what we might put into it to make suggestions or changes or whatever, I'm not sure the process for that. So I will check that out and then we'll schedule hearings on this according to what I find out. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. Cause I also, Madam Chair. Yeah. Cause I've been wondering, we talked about treating it as a bill as opposed to an executive order, it would be different. With this treating this as an executive order, given what you just said, if it was a bill that we made changes, it would go to other committees before it went to the floor for approval or disapproval. I'm just not sure if this, since the executive order, is it expected to go to any other committees besides government operations? Well, I don't know what other committee would go to except for appropriations. Right, that's one. So whether it's, and my guess is that the appropriation for this was in the governor's budget. So if it's accepted or even if there are changes, it would end up in appropriations somehow through the governor's budget. Okay. Here's my guess. But we will take testimony on it from a wide variety of people just so that we're clear where we're going here. And in that sense, treat it like a bill is taking testimony and suggestions for changes. And we'll work with Commissioner Schirling around what those changes might be if we have any suggestions. Senator Clarkson, did you have a question? I do. Michael, thank you for this. This is thoughtful and as you know, we've been working on it for a long time. I'm just curious about, and I applaud your notion of developing a statewide approach to the intersection of public safety and public health. And it goes back, I think to just something as simple as trauma and trauma's impact on everything from education to corrections to public safety. I mean, we're looking at public health and public safety now with this pandemic, and it has obviously different implications, but I'm just curious, that is such a breaking down the silos. If we could solve trauma and how children are affected by trauma in our world, we would save hundreds of millions of dollars across the system. Just suck it right up. Is that sort of what your intent is, is to have a sort of breaking down silos and doing, I'm just curious, because I don't see it mentioned the wellness piece in your three divisions, in your two departments and one division. Right. But you mentioned it and I thought it was so desiloed of you and I applauded it. If you look at our overall modernization strategy, Senator, I can send you the version, both from last year and one that's slightly tweaked this year. It's got at the very last thing, that fourth box has a construct for the criminal justice and public health delivered unified system, which is, it's got another four buckets. I don't know why it's four. I usually like to do things in nice prime numbers, three or five, but for some reason we have two, four bucket items. Educate, the premise is that. Education and prevention. Yeah, exactly. Best dollar spend is education and prevention and you get your most return for that. Then outreach and intervention. Then you cross the line to some kind of disorder or crime, alternative sanctions and then finally traditional courts corrections, hospitalization at the top end, which is most expensive and least effective. Right. I applaud that direction because if we can ever get there, we will have solved some of the base challenges that all these other departments are designed to correct. Yeah, so just a couple of parting thoughts if I may Madam Chair on this. The, one of the reasons I think it's been envisioned for my entire life to do the state's organization of public safety assets in this way under an agency is that driving toward a big unified construct like the one we just described, Senator, it's much harder if you're driving four, five or six different buses. It is much easier if everyone is on the same bus. And so those larger contextual policy things become slightly incrementally easier. They're still not easy because policy is hard, but they become easier when you have a unified effort. My final observation is more anticipatory than anything else. You're gonna hear from some people who are afraid of this. There is a smart man on the West Coast named Gordon Graham who was a risk manager who has an extensive history with the California Highway Patrol and has been thinking about things. Some of the things he was talking about doing in the early 80s are the things we're trying to operationalize today. He's quite a smart guy. And one of my favorite Gordon Graham quotes is this, there are two things that people hate, the status quo and change. Change makes people uncomfortable. We have tried to frame this in a way to ensure that many people's comfort as possible, that this is altruistic. It is about delivering better service to Vermonters. It is not about marginalizing any of the folks that we're talking about combining. And it is about ensuring that we're doing things using the correct decision-making lenses with uniformity across public safety operations. So I'll leave you with that. Thank you, commissioner. I appreciate that and I know we all do. So I will find out our timing here and when we need to dig into this more and let everybody know. If it is to be treated like a bill and has to pass both bodies or whatever, then we'll have to hurry up. If it has a little more leeway than that, then we will all schedule out it out a little bit farther. So we'll definitely let everybody know when we're taking it up again. Thank you, commissioner. I think I may be staying with you, but I'm just gonna shut down my video until you tell me to come back. Okay, so yes, because I think that we had, when we passed 124 and Senator Rom, you worked with us at the time, but we passed 124 and we created a lot of work for some people. And that work involved a bunch of studies that we asked or I should say reports. Some of them were actually also addressed by the governor who required the Department of Public Safety and different entities to come up with reports. And so some of them were the same and some of them were different and some were more expanded by us or by the governor. So one of the main groups that was charged with coming up with reporting to us was what was then called the Criminal Justice Training Council and is now called the Criminal Justice Council. So at the time it was kind of, they were in the middle of a search for an executive director and the whole council was being reorganized. And so they were in search of a chair for that. And so today what we're gonna do is we're gonna hear an update. And I'm not talking here about a final report because I told them that we wanted updates where they were with different issues. We don't wanna wait until we have final reports necessarily. So I have on my list here, I just went through 124 and I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 reports that the council was asked to give us. So with that, I think that, and I think Mr. Sheets that you don't know all of us necessarily. So I'm gonna ask the committee just to introduce themselves. I think Mr. Surrell, I think you probably know us but I will ask the committee. I'm Jeanette White from Wyndham County. I'm Anthony Polina from Washington County. Brian Collamore from Rutland County. Allison Clarkson, Windsor County District. Keisha Rahm from Chittenden County. So with that, what I would do and for those of you who have just joined us, I will remind us that we don't use chat. So if you are chatting, we're not paying any attention to you because chats, in my opinion chats are like sidebar conversations and if we were in the room, we wouldn't allow them. So however, if you do have studies or documents that you can share with Gail, then she'll post those and then she'll put them on our webpage afterwards. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Bill Surrell and Bill Schietz and let you take it away and maybe talk to us a little bit about the reorganization and the new members and how that's all going and then get into, it's all yours now. Maybe I should do this first. We sit and we sit and we sit. And it might be wise to take just a, if that's okay with you to take a five minute break and you might find us much more attentive. Does that work? Okay, so Gail, if you will just put up the thing, everybody put your mute and camera off. All right, so let's get started then and the only other word I would say to Bill Schietz and Bill Surrell is as we're going through this and if you have come up with in your studies and your reports, areas where you feel there needs to be legislative action taken in order to move you along or whatever, then you need to let us know that also so that we can take care of that, okay? All right, so I'm going to turn it over to the two of you and however you want to present this. Thank you, Madam Chair. Bill Surrell, I'll defer to you or would you like me to go first? Well, it says that the host disabled my video and she has to, yeah. Gail, can we, I think these little people that you see with their little round bodies and round heads are pretty funny. Okay. But can we get Bill Surrell back? Okay, okay. Well, it's great to be back testifying before the Senate GovHops Committee. I spent five years as administration secretary and was before GovHops a lot and then quite a bit in just under 20 years as attorney general. So it's nice to be back here. And I thought what I might do is just tell you a little bit how I came to be chair of the council and just to remind you that in S-124 you created the Vermont criminal justice council and basically did away with the old criminal justice training council and among other things you significantly expanded the size of the council to increase voices from outside law enforcement. I think the governor has seven appointees under the bill, but for more of the governor seven appointees, he's restrained to make the appointments within nominations or recommendations, one from the NAACP chapter in Wyndham County, another the NAACP chapter in Rutland County. Someone with the history of experiencing some mental health challenges. Another person who works in the mental health arena, you added the commissioner of mental health. I could go on and then, but you created this greatly expanded council and that the governor's three appointees may not be in law enforcement or have an immediate family member in law enforcement. So S-124 really tried to change the voice of this new entity, the criminal justice training council. And among other things, what S-124 does is to create a uniform standard of recruitment of basic training for law enforcement applicants and in-service training for law enforcement officers and to maintain statewide standards of law enforcement officer professional conduct by the council accepting and tracking complaints of elected officer, unprofessional conduct, adjudicating charges of unprofessional conduct and imposing sanctions on the certification of an officer who the council finds as committed unprofessional conduct. And then as was already said, any number of other issues besides the recruitment and the training both in the academy and in-service training for active officers, but also to recommend statewide standards, for example, to take a position on whether access to body camera footage used by law enforcement, whether those should be public records, you know, should stuff be excised and such. Another provision that says that if facial recognition becomes a part of law enforcement to the software that this council is to recommend a statewide policy of the dos and don'ts of using facial recognition software. I could go on and on. The bottom line is this newly expanded council, the old duties of the training council are very significantly expanded. And so on a day in late October of last year, I got a phone call first from Commissioner Shirling and then a little later in the day from the governor's legal counsel, J. Persing Johnson, both saying that they were calling it the governor's, the governor knew they were calling and there is this entity, this new entity called the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council, or excuse me, the Vermont Criminal Justice Council and the governor gets to appoint the chair and they're calling to ask if I would consider being the chair. And well, you know, I was flattered to be thought of but I had never heard of S-124 or the action that the legislature took on this but a request from the governor and J. Johnson, Mike Shirling, I said, yeah, let me do some due diligence. And I started about three weeks of due diligence including reading and rereading S-124 and writing down like three pages of questions for J. Johnson, but what does this mean? And you da da da da da. And called a number of people in and outside of law enforcement including the chair to talk about really what is this is all about and is essentially is the legislature is this serious and you really want change and are you looking to this council to really work hard and to improve things? And I got a lot of advice from the different people I consulted with, couple said, no way, no how, don't go there but the majority sentiment was you go for it. And so I asked to speak with the governor and the week before Thanksgiving I had a meetings call with the governor and legal counsel and I asked the governor some questions about what he was looking to see accomplished and such and bottom line was at the end of that call I said, well, I was flattered to be asked and I'd be honored to serve if you still want me. And the truth is since that day or the Monday this was a Friday that following Monday of Thanksgiving week I started interacting with bill sheets on virtually every day and many days for hours on end. And what I want to talk a little bit about is when I talked to you, Senator White, you said, hey, I know there's some tight time frames in the bill but we want to make sure that you're making progress. You don't have to have everything done by such and such a date but we want to know that this isn't something that just put on a shelf and people are gone, we'll get to it when we get to it. So I want to just take a few minutes to talk about progress. And I had initially under the bill the committee was to be fully constituted by December 1st. Well, that didn't happen for a lot of reasons obviously COVID and whatever but the governor's office didn't receive the recommendations from some of the groups that were to make recommendations by then. And so it was actually the month of December that there was a lot of work done to try to get those recommendations and then get biographical data and information and then to make a recommendation to the governor's office. And ultimately the governor appointed Brian Searles the former police chief in South Burlington former secretary of transportation, respected guy in law enforcement and government circles and Chris Loris who was the formerly the mayor of Rutland. And so the three of us are the three sort of unfettered appointees by the governor. And it wasn't until, and so we were going to try to have, I wanted to have two meetings in the month of December because I knew we had this date of January 15th to talk to the appropriations and government operations committees about not only progress but what are our resource needs. And since we didn't have all of the committee members appointed yet, I didn't want to go ahead and have a meeting of 19 of the ultimate 23 members of the council when those who were not going to be participating in the meetings were some of those who you most want to have on the council. So I pushed back and said, okay, we're not going to meet in December. And bottom line is we have met twice in the month of January. And the first meeting, the first week of January was really for us to all introduce each other and to talk about some committees because the truth of the matter is 23 member council is a bit unwieldy. And so we, there were half dozen or so pre-existing subcommittees under the old training council, those continue but we've created a handful of new committees including professional responsibility. That whole issue of tracking complaints and adjudicating complaints and whatever and Bill Sheets will talk about some of the demands on the table for us just in that arena already. And so what we did was we had a description of the duties of the various subcommittees because truthfully the real work of this council is going to be at the subcommittee level and then bring things to the full council for the full council to a job to reject or alter. So we had a forum where all members of the council could state their top three preferences for which subcommittees to be on. And we asked that they get them to us during the several first several days after that first meeting. And then we spent a bunch of time internally trying to move people to accommodate their preferences to what they wanted to be on. The chairs of the preexisting committees stayed in place like the canine committee, the highway safety committee and such. But for the new committees, I appointed chairs of those individual subcommittees. And one of the largest subcommittees is this training oversight committee. And that committee is essentially in charge of training. But it's also front end stuff like the council is to approve the exams that would be recruits to the academy would need to take in order to be deemed qualified to even be trained as a law enforcement officer in Vermont. And what I mentioned about facial, excuse me, the body camera footage, that kind of stuff. Another one of their provisions is the councils to make a recommendation on whether military equipment could maybe accepted by law enforcement in the state. Those kinds of duties will be assigned to working groups of the council. And most of them, facial recognition, this and that, will be working groups within the training and oversight committee. And so we had our second meeting last week, I think it was, and we announced the membership of the subcommittees, the new chairs, and then we called on the chairs of all of the subcommittees to have a subcommittee meeting no later than next Friday, the fifth. And asked the subcommittees to discuss who, if they wanted thought it makes sense to have a vice chair or vice co-vice chairs of the subcommittee to take a position on that with the idea that each subcommittee, and this will happen every month when we have our monthly meeting, the subcommittees will report on what progress they have made on the issues, the charges that are under the jurisdiction of those particular subcommittees. And then we'll have an overall master calendar that has the dates, the optimum dates for getting various things done. So we can all sort of monitor if we're making progress towards those dates that are set out in 124, or otherwise we've been asked to try to meet. So we're working and Bill Sheetz and I are trying to attend every single at least inaugural subcommittee meetings. So we're on Microsoft meetings calls virtually every day for the next few weeks. Couple of other things that we've been doing is there are two positions at the Academy under the executive director, one in charge of training, one in charge of the administrative services. And the administrative services position was vacant. And this is the leadership team at the Academy. So we solicited applications for that. We had online interviews of a handful of candidates and we chose a person who came highly recommended for that really important position. And it's female and her background investigation is I think all but almost done. And we're hopeful that she will be fully on board as of either one or two weeks from today. The top position is the executive director. And we are very fortunate that Bill Sheetz agreed before my time as chair to act until some time in March as the interim executive director of the council. And if you don't know Bill Sheetz, you know, he's a retired major from Vermont State Police. And you know, they talk about warriors and guardians and the different approaches to policing and how much the guardian types, the helping law enforcement officers, what they can do when you interact with them on the side of the road, as opposed to somebody who's there and is there to intimidate you. And Bill Sheetz is one of these guys who's respected in law enforcement, but he's got great people skills. He works really hard and we're gonna miss him, but we are so fortunate to have him doing what he's doing for us right now. So we advertise for executive director because we need an executive director by some time in March. Got 19 applications. We got a subcommittee. We went through the applications and we decided to interview eight of those 19. And so we will be having on this coming Monday, four hour long interviews and Wednesday, four more and each interview will be followed by a half hour of the interview. Folks, party to the interview and we've opened it up to the whole council and other stakeholders to observe. Not everybody's gonna be asking questions. We're gonna have agreed questions, but we're gonna have a sort of a postmortem or whatever for each interview, each person interviewed for a half hour right at the end of their interview. So people to kind of talk about how they responded and the idea is that we will probably end up with a second round of interviews after these first eight this week, but our intention then obviously we'd have to have a really substantial background investigation of probably the top two candidates and assuming the number one choice is passes, passes, it's, you know, we'll move forward, but any of them good progress there. So I forgot to make- Bill, I see that Senator Clarkson has a question. I don't know if you wanna take questions or if you'd rather. Okay. Is this a good, it's about the applications and the interviews. And I'm just curious, Bill, if you could give us a snapshot of the eight you've chosen, how did we, I assume had a national search. National search. If you could just give us a snapshot of the eight that are the ones you've chosen to be interviewed, it would be, I think it would be great for us to get a sense of who's interested in this job around the country. Let's just say we had some very different profiles and folks who applied. We had some retired chiefs of police from municipalities and different parts of the country. Some other active law enforcement officers, some folks would virtually know law enforcement experience. There was one candidate who's heavily worked on political campaigns around the country. And some folks who worked in law enforcement, but like prisoners advocacy rights, issues background like that. Some folks out of corrections and who in their applications were touting sort of progressive corrections policies. So it's not a, it is not critical to us that there has to be someone who has been in law enforcement all of his or her career to be the executive director. We feel good about the eight that we're interviewing. I have no clue who will end up being the, even the ones who will get the second interview. I mean, it's a process where we've got a lot of folks who are gonna be listening in, observing and their voices are gonna be heard in the process of how many to ask back for a second interview and then the ultimate discussions about what names are really our total finalists. So it's gonna be very, a lot of work this next week, but very interesting week and an important week for the council and for training and the operations of law enforcement in this state because I think what S-124 does, among other things, like its emphasis on, and our emphasis is gonna be in training on de-escalation issues. I mean, that's that whole mental health component that you put in S-124. Obviously racial sensitivity issues and not just uniform collection and reporting of data, but in those, the exams that one would need to take to be qualified for the academy to try to root out the kinds of folks who raise red flags as to whether they might not do us proud in their interactions with Vermonters and those who find themselves in our state. So we'll see, but we're, Senator White asked about, are we making progress? And I think we are definitely making progress. I do wanna say before I turn it over to Bill, one of the things I said at the first council meeting was that during that period of time between when I said I would do it in the first council meeting, I went, did a lot of reading, including looking at the old training council bylaws or rules. And fundamentally in certain ways, the contents of those rules are just inconsistent with S-124. For example, to be a member, to be the chair of a subcommittee, you have to be in law enforcement. To be a member of this or that committee, you have to be in law enforcement or whatever. And so what I told the full council at the first meeting was if, and we gave a briefing document of, I don't know, 100 pages or so to each member of the council before the first meeting and told them that just certain pages, like a synopsis of 124 were most important for them to read, but the council rules were in there. And just in the event that anybody read the council rules and felt like they were second or third class citizens because they weren't in law enforcement or whatever. I said that we are gonna revise the council rules, but that's not a process that you can do overnight. And I am just telling you, as the chair, I am gonna pretend that the provisions in the council rules accept any that give due process rights, for example, to an officer who's charged with misconduct, that I'm gonna treat the rules as not effective. And so I just wanted to let you know that because I think S124 is more recent. That's the better statement of what the legislature intends and what this council to be all about. And so we're, one of the working groups is gonna be revising the rules and that's gonna take a number of months, but we're treating the rules as not in effect. So just one other thing, I, what, oh, Commissioner Scherring, I don't know if he's still on, but he mentioned, you know, he was talking about this agency of public safety and there is a provision for the council in S124. And it says the council shall consult with the league of cities, towns and other interested stakeholders to determine whether the council should be reestablished within a state agency or other oversight entity. So that in my reading is apart from the issue of whether there is an agency of public safety or the question for the council to take a position and might be several people feeling different ways is whether we should be independent or under some agency or other oversight entity in state government. And as Commissioner Scherring said, the council, talk about drinking water out of the end of a fire hose, you know, we haven't had time to even talk about this issue and to try to hear from some of the different voices on the council, their feelings, whether independence for the council is the preeminent issue or whether it would be the benefits of us being under some other entity. And so the last thing I'll say before I turn it over to Bill is that one of the things we were to do here by July or January 15th was to honor before the 15th of January where to report to the House and Senate committees on appropriations and on government operations, specifying the resources the council needs to fully operate as set forth in law, including the resources it needs to implement the provisions of this act. And we're here to do that today, but I wanna express my disappointment that despite my various understandings about the work of the council and the importance of the work of the council, I was not happy to see that we're not recommended for one dime of an increase over our existing appropriation. And I'm gonna turn it over to Bill Sheets and he's gonna talk about not Cadillac staffing, but a baseline of staffing resource needs that we have to come close to meeting the job that you have set out for the council in 124. So with that, I'll turn it over to Bill and then maybe he and I can both field questions in tandem if that works for you Senator. It works for me, I didn't see Senator Rahm's hand up and before we, that's okay, but before we go there. I can't see the hands up. Well, no, we use this hand. Oh. We don't use those little yellow ones. But before I ask her if she has a question, I have to say, I bet there are people who got appointed to the council who had no idea you were gonna be such a task master. And you have clearly been getting things done and being very busy. The other thing I wanted to say is I was glad to hear you say that you weren't gonna pay attention to some of the bylaws or some of the that were there because one of the things I wanted to ask is if on the subcommittees there was a mix of law enforcement and not law enforcement. And then I also wanted to warn Bill Sheets about his March departure date. If you remember when Jim Baker took over as interim commissioner of public safety, he was going to do it until April 1st of last year and he's still there. So don't hold your breath. So Senator Rahm, did you have? Thanks Madam Chair. This could be addressed maybe what Bill was already gonna say. But what I wondered about was if the criminal justice everyone gets paid a stipend and there's any possibility of more stipends for people who have a harder time. They don't have a staff role that pays them for this kind of work. So I didn't see that in the appropriation and the other thing being I was just reading through it and I'm new and I'm trying to figure out what happened last year as well. It looked like there was some report back about investigation into use of force that was about the recommendation for where that would go. And I didn't know if that, if I missed in here. No, there are 14, I have a list here of 15 if you include the use of force. And the use of force report I think was primarily to go to judiciary. If I'm not mistaken, but details of how it is implemented would come here. But so there are all of those reports that need to come to us. Okay. So, so Bill, this is very confusing. Your counsel must find it very confusing to have two bills. I'm not sure about that. But Madam Chair, thank you. Good afternoon, senators. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I just a very, very quick background. I did 30 years in the state police and I was, I actually had the pleasure of testifying multiple, multiple times in front of many of you during that time in various committees. I was happily in the behavioral science-based leadership consulting world for three years until my phone rang. And the offer was, can you come down and help out because the background investigation of the last selected executive director kind of didn't go well. And I said I would be more than happy to training and the academy is near and dear to my heart. So I did it with open arms. And I wanna start just by saying thank you. You don't hear it enough. Thank you for S-124. As a major in the Vermont State Police, I spent 10 years in the council, the old 12 person council. Now it's 24. I did four years as the vice chair of that council. This really is the council that I kind of always envisioned. And the onboarding process, I've had in-depth discussions with all of the new people and it's incredible. It's the passion and the depth of experience and the variety of lived experiences that they bring is critical. So thank you, because you don't hear it enough. The council itself, again, 24, perhaps a bit unwieldy, but these subcommittees and or working groups are really where it's gonna happen. Madam chair, if it's okay with you, I was asked to do the same thing on the house side. Tomorrow I'm more than happy to send a report where the 24 members of the council and or proxies are highlighted and it'll reflect and show you which subcommittees they're actually on. Oh, yes, perfect. So again, the energy that they bring to this and what we did is S124 is about a 49 page report, the first 29 or so impact us in different ways. When you really just take out the text that truly impacts us section by section, it's a three-page document. So they all have that. Every single subcommittee is using that as their guiding document for moving forward to determine exactly what they have to do. So I assure you that we, the council, the staff, everybody is taking this very seriously. With that, I will say there's a lot of work there and I will say that we need your help. There's 12 full-time equivalent positions here with a budget of just $2.7 million in FY 22, 92% of which is beyond our control. It's fee for space, paying the rent, paying salaries, benefits and things like that. It's fairly lean. The one most pressing thing that I've found in my time here as the interim executive director is the professional regulation subcommittee or professional regulation concept. I think there was a belief at one point that it wasn't gonna be a heavy lift. It is the heaviest lift. There are 31 pending cases. Now, let me preface that by saying in Vermont, we do things extremely well. I've had the pleasure of teaching, again, behavioral science-based leadership throughout the U.S. and Canada and the fact that we have one entity for training and we're one of only four or five states, we do things in Vermont exceptionally well. Can we do better? Of course we can. We'd be silly to say we couldn't. We can and we should do better. This professional regulation doesn't replace internal affairs investigations. That's not the design. It's a review process to hold the profession accountable. So in my humble opinion, you nailed it, you knocked it out of the park. This was long overdue. We need this. But again, I think we need your help in terms of staffing. There's currently no professional regulation investigator, capability capacity on board here. It just doesn't exist. There's no staff attorney and the pace and the level and depth of these investigations, even if they're reviews, I'll give you an example without stating any names, of course. There was a case though that just was referred to us from the attorney general's office where they declined to prosecute but rightfully so said criminal justice counsel. Please take a look at this to determine if now there's any violations that we need to be aware of and you need to take action. We're over 100 hours just in the review of that investigation. And that was assigned to a training coordinator. We just simply candidly don't have the capacity. Here's what we have done. And I think it's very meaningful. Under the direction of Bill Sorrell in his role, we have created a professional regulation subcommittee of five people. You'll see that when I send the report tomorrow. Those five people will assist this position, the executive director's position and the assigned attorney with a review of all of these cases. So think about the impact before. Really the way it's laid out now it comes just to the executive director and that candidly is too much autonomy. It should be done in a collaborative manner with an oversight body, professional regulation subcommittee. So we're gonna start making progress. That committee starts meeting next week. They'll start reviewing cases the week after that. Now 29, 30, 31, whatever it is right now sounds like a lot. Remember nine of those are what we consider category A. And that means those are those cases where we're awaiting judication because those officers were charged in court, either state's attorneys, attorney generals, in state or out of state, et cetera. So those are not anything we really can take action on now. But I assure you long gone are the days if there's a case that's referred to us where say for example, the officer simply says, I'm gonna resign and I'm not gonna take up law enforcement. It's too risky. We owe it to the public. We owe it to you to make sure that we are bringing that to the full council. And if decertification is an option, we should act on that. That's, it's just an absolute. So the people that are on that subcommittee, there's only one sworn law enforcement position and that's the chair, the other four are not and they represent different groups. I gotta tell you, it's meaningful from where I sit and where I will happily sit again in the consulting world to know that we're getting this right, that we have a member from the Rutland chapter of the NAACP that's gonna see all of these cases in review. It's impactful, it's meaningful. So there's a lot of areas I wanna talk about when that's 124, I'm very mindful of your time. I will say that we look at this as an opportunity. When I say we, I truly mean the crew here. Cindy Taylor Patch is actually on the call. She's the director of training. She runs this place folks. She's the one that makes this place go every single day and they do it well. I had a healthy respect for what was done here. Now that I'm sitting here, I have such tremendous respect. We've operated in a COVID environment successfully, even though 18 recruits in the last class came down with COVID and we had to shut down for a while, we're back up and running. So there's many, many things going on. And I think just if we can do a real truly mindful review and implementation of the many, many things that are in S124, we're gonna have an impact. We're gonna have an impact because of you. So again, thank you. But I do say that the struggle for me where I sit before I walk out at the end of March, hopefully Madam Chair is we now are coming under the agency of public safety. My personal view is it's overdue. I just think about it from where I sit in a leadership position. Autonomy is great until it goes wrong. And this position has a great, great deal of autonomy. And it should report to somebody in an agency construct. I think that's very valuable. If you're not held accountable, bad things can happen. That's the bottom line. The agency though, the struggle that I'm having right now is I don't know that we're gonna have much progress in these needed positions. And they're needed, and they're needed right now. And I think, I'm not sure if Commissioner Shrillings is back on, but I think if we asked him, hey, Commissioner Shirling, under the current construct, do you have an available investigator and attorney that you can loan us over here? The answer is likely gonna be no. There's not a, so I hope that we don't have to wait until FY23 because we need that now. The process deserves that now. So I think I probably rambled on long enough. I do wanna go on the record, by the way. Ready for this? I heard Bill Surrell in an open meeting calling me his best friend. That means I've done my job. Every single day we've been in communications. So I've heard that. I just wanted to get it on Senate testimony that he said that it's on it. So I have a couple of things and then I'll call on the committee members. But thank you for thanking us for 124. It was a slog and it took a long time. But we persisted and we might have, S124, 2021 version, right? I don't know. We'll see where we go. But I do have a couple of questions about the oversight, professional regulation and oversight. And we had talked about this at one point in the past about should the business function of certification and decertification be a, the business function be part of OPR instead of the council and the academy. That not setting the standards or anything like that, but just as they do with nurses and dentists and other professions. And the other question that I had is, I thought, and I can't quite remember, but I thought we expanded the role of the community advisory council to have more input into the oversight and professional regulation and looking at cases. Am I wrong about that? Or how did that work with what you're doing? So there is, if you're talking about the, it's a council and we were actually going to bring this up in testimony, it's a four or five person subset. We think and we'd like to demonstrate to you that the approach that we're taking now because we went from 12 to 24 people on the council itself, the larger council, that we can have the same impact, probably more of an impact the way that we're doing it now, but we do need to clarify that. All of the appointments, are those the ones that Madam Chair that are governor appointees? You know, I can't quite remember. And I think that the difference was that many of them or that they weren't necessarily law enforcement if I remember right. Yeah, so 20, I have it in front of me. So it's essentially considered a board. It's a criminal justice former name, right? Training council advisory committee. The board terms for all of those folks and they were all from the civilian side expired in 2019. So we wanted to revisit that with you to determine if what we're doing now in a layered approach through S-124 is can possibly replace that. Okay, I think we'll put that on the list for one of the things that we talk about a little bit more in depth. Okay, and I forgot the compensation piece. Everybody on the council is eligible to submit compensation for, I think it's 50 or $55 a day for when they're actively engaged in anything related to council work. We have tried to carve off a very small piece of our existing this year and FY22 budget to make sure we can do that. And we know that $50 isn't really enticing people to be involved. But that's what all the boards and commissions in the state get, except for jury duty, which is 30. So far, and I know they are being tasked with a lot of work when I say that they're excited. It's incredible. I hope actually at some point you get a chance to perhaps call in some of the newer 12 people members and just have a dialogue because it's moving. It really, it's, I can't say it enough. It's just tremendous. It's exciting. I would love to do that. I think Senator Rahm. Well, first of all, I don't remember if she's a formal member, but I think you're lucky enough to have Tabitha more on the council or involved in the work. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but I often stayed up to date on things from her. I don't know if I- So Tabitha is a member of one of our subcommittees, our fair and impartial policing subcommittee. I worked while I was happy to hear her voice again and see her just the other day. She was on a committee. I chaired our fair and impartial policing committee for 10 years when I was with the state police and she was there the entire way. She's awesome. Yeah. I had a question when you talk about oversight and professional regulation. If there's any intersection with a topic that's been in the press a lot lately, which is giglio files and just the idea of having more than the state's attorneys holding accountable law enforcement to honest impartial technology like that. There's no current tie with the exception of often when we get a case referred to us and there's an internal affairs investigation attached to that, there may in fact then from that respective state's attorney or attorney general be a letter placed on file by them. So we see that in companion cases and we have no direct oversight of those actions taken by the state's attorneys. I know there's some discussion ongoing. I've heard in other committee testimony that they're trying to do something separately on their side to perhaps maybe be a little more in unison collectively within the various counties but that's the depth of my knowledge there. And I do see that David share is with us. So at some point we'll hear from him and maybe from Pepper about how different counties look at that. And Madam Chair, I owe you an answer because you did start to speak about Office of Professional Regulation. Yeah. So when I first came in, I really was of the mindset of I'm not sure who needs to do it as long as they get it right. And I think and I wasn't here but I'm of the understanding that last year on both sides in the House and Senate there were testimony, there was testimony given that perhaps it should go there but they would need to be reasonably staffed with additional attorneys and or investigators. That staffing didn't happen. It didn't go to them. It stayed with us. Honestly, if we do this correctly and I think the construct that we have right now is correct. I think we certify, I think we should decertify. I think it's our responsibility. I just wanna make sure that we have the resources to be successful. Yeah, I think that the way they operate when they do is they give the license. The profession sets the standards and the requirements. OPR does the business function of issuing the license and then de-issuing the license if they need to. And the way they are funded is it's all through the fees of the licensees. And I know that when we had this conversation before there was a lot of pushback from people who didn't think that law enforcement officers should pay for a license fee. So this conversation kind of creeps up all the time because our committee also does OPR and the professions. So it's there. I think that probably right now with everything that is happening it probably isn't a wise move right now. But at some point it might be and then moving resources if need be. But what do you think committee? Everybody's chiming in. So, okay. Al and Senator Clarkson. I think it's lower on my list right now but I think it's something for us to look at further. I mean, I think that it would be great for Bill and Lauren actually to meet and chat about it and see what it might look like. I mean, just so that you at least understand what it might look like at OPR. Yeah. I would think that would be a productive. I think it's something for us to consider but maybe not right now while you have all the other stuff that's on your very full platter. And may I just say as to the payment and compensation of boards and commission members I put a bill and a couple of years ago it tried to increase it to $100 a day which was we considered it but the number of people that are on our boards and commissions is substantial. Now Brian and Jeanette are doing their best to streamline that work and those unnecessary ones but how many of Jeanette and Brian would you say are do we have currently serving as board members and commission and all over the state? Oh, Brian what would you say about 3,000 maybe people? How many people? Yeah. Oh yeah, there's easily that. Yeah. So I mean when we talk about taking it up for what I mean there has to be sort of equity in it and that's a lot of people to I mean that's a big budget impact. So it got shelved but it may return again. I introduced a bill a couple of years ago to increase the jury duty to $50 and Eric Fitzpatrick did a study to see if we had just increased it by the cost of living every year it would have been $51.73. So we were pretty close but even that had such an impact on the judiciary budget that they said no. So. Yeah. Okay, any other questions or comments, committee? Bill, did you have? Yeah, just we're gonna send you the budget document and if. We have it, Bill. Okay, then if you get through that if you think that we're not gilding the lily that what we say we need to do the job and if you're of the view that that job is that important if you, we will present before the approved committees and but if you talk to your colleagues on the appropriate committee is whether you think what we're asking for is a priority that would be much appreciated and helpful to us. Senator Clarkson. Perhaps we should have an opportunity to have that as an additional conversation have us look at it. It sounds like you're suggesting we need at least two more people. The investigator and the lawyer. No, the investigator and the lawyer. Yeah. So what I would suggest is that I don't know if everybody had a chance to read the report that was submitted, but there is the report and it goes through all of the things that were assigned in 124 to the council. And so what I'd like us to do, I guess in a, well, this wouldn't be happening in budget adjustment anyway. There's, they wouldn't do it there. But so what I'd like us to do, I guess is to look at these and then in a while have another update on where some of these are some of these reports like I read the report but I must admit that I don't remember all of it. And, you know, like where we are with level two to level three and where we are with all of those different issues and then have the budget discussion at the same time. Does that make sense? Yeah. We have a budget proposal on our website for today under Bill's name, but and the report is in our reports is that right Gail? Is the VCJC report in under reports? It's under document today's documents. I don't see it under today's document. I just see the, I just see it just comes up as a budget proposal. If you look under today's documents, there was a, from Bill Sheetz, there was a report on today's documents. Yeah, that's it. It's the budget proposal. I'm looking at it. Well, it's the full report. It isn't just the budget proposal. Okay, good. That's great. Great. Thanks. That's what I thought was just a budget for, okay. No, it's, so yeah, so if we can, and then look at more of these specific issues and I'll talk with the use of force thing is a different kind of report I think because the others are all recommendations that we've made around changes like a central port for reporting allegations and alternative routes to certification and that kind of thing. They're more, the use of force is responding to a bill that we passed last year and which I in fact didn't vote for, but we did pass that bill and there's a tremendous amount of conversation that needs to happen around how that gets implemented and what it actually means. So I think that'll be divided up somehow between here and judiciary. It went to judiciary, but really is a law enforcement issue. So we'll work that out. So anything more, committee that, okay. Well, thank you so much. And I have to say that I am, I'm really impressed by the amount of work that's being done and I'm also really impressed by the enthusiasm for embracing the changes that we, and I think it wasn't a hard sell because I firmly believe that law enforcement leaders in this state have been moving in this direction for a long time. So it wasn't as if we were doing something that was opposed and controversial. The details might have been, but not, so I just wanna thank you all for working so hard on this and to the leaders in law enforcement who have been moving in this direction for a while and working to try to get it right. So, and Allison. May I just add, I just like to thank Jeanette because Jeanette really was doping in the pursuit of this bill and really this S-124 wouldn't have happened without you and your belief in it. No, truly. And it is quite exciting to see all that work over two years be fleshed out with such enthusiasm as Jeanette said, but really we owe Jeanette. Jeanette was really the energy force behind this bill. She brought a lot of us along and I think we did good work and it's exciting to see it materialize. But thank you, Jeanette. Thank you, but the past committees and maybe this one, I must admit have sometimes gone kicking and screaming down this path. And the only way we promised them lunch when we went out to our eight sites around the state and listened to people and stuff like that. So, but no, but it was a really group effort with the committees, the committee members. So, okay. So, thank you. Thank you. And we'll see you again. We'll schedule you again. And I think that's a great idea to have some of the new council members come in and just talk to us about their experiences and stuff. So, thank you. That's a great suggestion. Okay, committee. Tomorrow we are gonna look at all things elections. So, you have your lists. We do, it's a long one. It is a very long list. And I think that what we'll do by- Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. I think the way we'll do this is to have those, not look at, have those groups who wanna give us their ideas. Like the secretary of state and VPURG and I don't remember what it's called, vote at home if we get a chance and have them present what they're very briefly to us about what their issues are and what they'd like to see us do. Then I think what I'd like to do is at some point then look at the issues that are, if we have issues that we all agree are something that we can't address this year because they're either too complicated to long-term, the 16 year old vote strikes me as one of those. It would take the constitutional amendment. So there's no way we can do that. So if we can just have maybe in our minds a list of the things that we individually think aren't gonna happen this year, we can start crossing those off and then take intensive testimony on the issues that seem reasonable for us to be pursuing. Does that make sense? Yes. Yup. So your final list is embedded in the email you sent us, right? It's not a separate attachment. No, it is the email, yeah. Right, okay. Yeah, I guess, and I did ask Gail to post it. So I think maybe it got posted. Is that right Gail? It is posted, but it will not show up until tomorrow morning. So I will send a list to everybody who's on the docket for tomorrow. Okay. And all the committee members. No, that's great. So the documents don't show up until the day. Okay, so that's good to know because if there's something that we want people to be able to respond to, we should send it out to them separately. Exactly. Okay, yeah, I didn't know that. Okay, so I see we still have Mike Shirling and Chief Pete. And I don't know that we have ever met you, Chief Pete. Have you ever been in our committee before? Hello and good afternoon, everyone. I've been in one of the legislative committees last year, but this one I'm not, I don't believe it, but being here and listening, it's been a great, great opportunity. And I've had the chance to meet with several of you all virtually and just thank you again for the invitation for the opportunity to be here. And you're our new Chief at Montpelier, right? Yes, ma'am. Ah, exciting, good work. And the way we tend to do this is Gail has kind of what we call the usual suspects. And when an issue comes up, she sends just kind of this notice to them. So you'll be on our list for the usual suspects for law enforcement issues. And if there are other issues, also you can let us know. I'm honored and humbled by that. And I hope to be a very diligent resource for everyone. Well, thank you. And thank you for your work around the inaugural events and all that continues. So thank you, that's, thank you for that. Thank you, ma'am. And if I may, you have a very good coming in and only being here for a while. I mean, like was previously mentioned, everyone has work to do to get better. But from where I sit and from what I've seen, you have a law enforcement community who wants to move towards progressive 24th century policing. And it's an honor and it's a privilege to be here serving with them. Great, great. Thank you. Thank you. I think that is true. Unfortunately, it's a few bad apples that get all the publicity and the ire of us out in the community. So we have to watch that. So commissioner Schirling, did you want to have any parting words for us? Or you just have nothing else to do. I wish that were the case, Senator. I, for some reason I had on the calendar discussion of an update from Sheriff Bonyak and I on body-worn cameras, but that may be jumbled in the calendar. You know, what happened is that we took the kind of the ones at the council we're going to do. And I see Bill has left. So committee, do you want to hear that right now? Or do you want to wait and have Bill come back and the commissioner? And full disclosure, we sent you an update document and the LEAB will hand off to the criminal justice council this work, but a lot of work has been done. And I think it's all captured in the document. So I don't necessarily need to encumber more of your time. Okay. That's such a gracious way of saying. Can I ask you a question, commissioner? In the governor's budget address yesterday, he talked about body cams, but he talked about body cams for all state employed law enforcement, right? Not body cams for all law enforcement in the state. Correct, that's correct. And in his proposed budget adjustment, there's funds for the remainder of the state law enforcement entities to get the requisite number of body cameras. Okay, that's what I thought. I just wanted to make that clear. Alison? How many more is that, Michael? I mean, that's the Fish and Wildlife, the DMV, that crowd, right? I mean, all those. I don't know. I'm sorry, I don't know the number, Senator, but it's DMV, the warden service, the and liquor and the liquor enforcement folks. And just enough cameras to deal with the folks that are responders and forward facing in much the same way we've deployed them for state police. So the administrative staff and folks that are doing background and investigations in the background or not, there's no expense for that. Okay. Any other questions or comments or, yeah, Alison? May I just add on, Michael, I would be remiss if we didn't all thank you also for your work in and around everything that was swirling around the Capitol. And it continues, I know that work around the inauguration and the threats that we face. But I just, you know, we're so grateful for all that work, much of which we don't see, but we're all so grateful. Thank you. And so happy things went smoothly and we had a peaceful transition of power. Thank you. I'll pass that along to the team as well. And my parting comment is that graciousness you hear was honed in Senate economic development with all things commerce in the first three years. Good, good, good. That's, so next time we have reports, I'll be more, be clearer about which report and who's going to give it so that we can focus in on those reports. So my apologies and I'll send a note to Bill, to Sheriff Bill. Thank you, Madam Chair, have a good day. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye. Anything else committee that we need to... Jenna, I just need to say, unfortunately I'll be a little bit late tomorrow. I have to present a bill to the education committee, but I'll keep it brief. I asked them if I could do it some other day. They said, no, it has to be tomorrow. Really? There? Yeah. I said, they said, can you do it Thursday? And I said, well, I'd rather do it Wednesday or Friday, whatever. And I said, no, it's Thursday. So it'll be brief though. I don't think it's going to be long. We better speak to Senator Campion about his inflexibility. I have a related announcement of a similar sort. I was asked to speak in Senate education on a piece of legislation on Friday at 1.15. Anthony, I'd be happy to switch with you if you need Friday. And I could take Thursday, but maybe they were different times. No, they said right after the floor, you know, 1.15 or after the 15 minutes after the floor. If you want my Friday slot, I could do Thursday at 1.15. Well, that's probably high level negotiation. I have a burning question. I just don't want to miss too much of the elections issues. I want to hear them. But are we going to start off tomorrow with the Secretary of State talking first? So I'll probably leave you back before he's done. You will. Allison, I have a burning question. We all want to know what the new Shahs was like. I mean, your new shopping experience. Oh, I went to the old Shahs, right? I went to the old Shahs, but it was a new. Well, no, it was a new grocery store for me. I haven't I since March 13th, I have been to the pharmacy, the hardware store, Hannah Ferds, and once to my sister's house. So going to a different grocery store was really exciting. It was very exciting, Anthony. Thank you. So you went to the new one to us, like not the center of town. No, I went to the old Shahs in the center of town, but it was a new experience. It wasn't it got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. It's old to us, but it's new to Jeanette. I mean, it was new. Did you go the right way up and down the aisles the right way? I did. I followed the rules just like I was supposed to. I'm very good at following rules normally. So I just wanted to let the committee know, though, that the Windsor County court dismissed the Scott Woodward case about town meetings. I asked Tucker if there was anything that was written about it, because I'd be very curious to see what the reasoning was, how that happened. But that did get dismissed. Do you think it has anything to do with it being just a block and a half from my house? I don't think so. All right. This is an earlier day than some, but not. Thank you. It means we can do some of our legislative work we aren't able to do until like 9 at night.