 Okay, compliance and enforcement advisory subcommittee meeting, and I'll just go ahead and take roll. We've got Tim Wessel, Ashley Reynolds, President, Kerry, could you pronounce your last name so I stop butchering it? I can, yeah. Can you hear me already? I can hear you. Jig air. Jig air. Kerry, Jig air is also present as well, and I believe Ingrid will be joining us. I think Mark, Mark Coleman is not, but we'll be coming to this in a few minutes, close here. And then from the board, it looks like we have Carl Herreth and Randy Herreth. Anyone else in the room? We've got Lindsay Wells from the Vermont Marijuana Registry, Brandon King from the Division of Liquor and Lottery, and Miss Holly Schuyler is on the phone calling in from overseas. And we've got one, two, three, four, five, six members of the public. And then I'm sorry, I also see that Julie Hoverman is also on the meeting as well. Yeah, I can't see that. Okay, and Mark Coleman is now. Okay, great. We've got a packed room today. We've got a couple more members of the public. It's going to be in Taiwan. Thanks everybody. All right, Tom. Well, thank you. Thanks everybody. I wanted to start today by just revisiting our seat-to-sale conversation. Bryn and I put together some very basic sentences that are very top-line overview of some direction that the subcommittee can give the board and Bryn and attempting to work with a vendor whether through an existing state contract or putting something out for a proposal that can just serve as a guide for what we're intending to form a relationship with. So Bryn is going to plug in her computer and share that screen. I'd ask both members of the subcommittee to look at those sentences. I wouldn't anticipate there's a whole lot of questions because they're not very substantive to be honest, but hey, that's where we're at. And then if there's no further questions, we're hoping that somebody might motion to vote on. Just language that the board can carry in conversations with a number of different vendors that we would seek to work with so we can get the ball rolling on this program in anticipation of meeting deadlines in 2022. So I'll give everybody a moment to read, ask questions. Thanks, Scott. I think your bonus is also in the call-in line. I'm really curious as well. So again, very broad, very basic. I think it gets to some direction for us. Anybody have any questions? This is Ingrid. I don't think that's very reasonable to me. Great. Bryn, if you mind pulling this back down, we can move to a vote. So as facilitator, I'll move for a vote on these sentences for CBCL tracking all in favor. Ingrid, time, Tim, Ashley. Aye. Aye. I don't think there's anybody to oppose. So the ayes have it. Thank you all. Another feather in the cap. Two meetings in a row. Take that. Okay. We're moving a little bit ahead of schedule, which is fantastic. I want to actually, we're running a little bit, oh no, we're running ahead of schedule. That's great. All right. So I want to turn the conversation back to local control. I know that Tom and Mark did an overview of local control measures they found in other Dillon states that have a legalized market. I don't know if, and I'm hoping that folks had an opportunity to really look through those recommendations or those model, excuse me, not recommendations. What other states have done over the course of the last couple days? Again, I'm recognizing this is supplemental to your day jobs. So Mark and Tom, maybe it might be crude into just very 30,000 foot go over what you found. And then Tim, I'm hoping that you might help lead us through parts of this discussion. I know Julie is looking to hold a roundtable and we want to get some substance from the subcommittee to inform that roundtable with municipalities and the League of Cities in town. So how can the subcommittee facilitate something to inform what they're going to be talking about? Sure. I can provide a summary of what the referencing materials that we're providing. It's going to be the same summary that I provided last meeting, but we're looking at your Dillon states and there aren't that many. But it was basically Nevada and Virginia, Virginia just legalized recently for adult use. And, you know, cities like Richmond, they haven't developed yet the local regulations. So what we disseminated were from towns like Reno and Las Vegas that you've seen, obviously larger, larger cities than we're dealing with in the state. But it was to give you an overview and, you know, you can see kind of how comprehensive those were. The caveat is that Vermont legislation, so that 164 is unlike what you're dealing with in Nevada as far as the enumerated powers that are given to the towns and the cities in Vermont versus the legislation in Nevada. And also in Virginia. So you have to take back what you're seeing there in context. And then what Mark had also found was from Connecticut and Virginia was some of the suggestions from their cannabis boards about giving some direction as far as local ordinances that they were going to disseminate in Connecticut and Virginia as well. Mark, do you have anything to add to that? No, I wanted to say that if you take a look at the Virginia law, you'll find some things that the state is giving over to the local governments. Such as the permission to levy a 3% tax on sales of cannabis to offer a special event licenses and fees. And, you know, those are two things. In the law, there are really a series of recommendations that we found kind of useful by the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit Review Commission that were recommendations just before the legislature passed the cannabis bill. And basically it was talking about authorizing retail license caps by locality and local authority, you know, they specified local authority over marijuana operations. It says the General Assembly may wish to consider including any legislation authorizing commercial marijuana sales and affirmation that local governments maintain their full powers to require commercial operations to meet local zoning requirements and so forth. So these are not necessarily in the statute now, but these were recommendations that may be worth looking at since you're considering making recommendations to the legislature. And then, Kyle, I also just wanted to add on top of that on Tim Wessel's recommendation, Mark and I did have a call with the city of the town. We had glint and sacked off in here and more just to get some of their perspective. Understandably, they were frustrated but recognized what Act 164 does as far as leaving them with some limited authority. But, you know, it was a good conversation and they did share that, you know, I also want to give kind of a perspective on what city towns were, what their capabilities were, you know, as far as zoning and what bylaws already were in existence. It sounds like they were saying maybe there were 10 or 11 different towns across the state that may have some kind of ordinances developed as far as zoning. But other than that, they were really looking towards whatever we can provide as a model so that they have a heads up going forward. But what they did want to stress and I think what I've also explained to the board as well was the timing of this is going to be, it's going to be really challenging just as far as even if we had something today as a model, it would take, and I'm sure Tim can expound on this, but it would take a while just for the towns and the cities to get hold of that and to adopt something going forward. And, you know, the fear is for the cannabis industry in general is that's typically where the bottleneck occurs, especially if we're kind of ramming down all sorts of ordinances all at once and it's going to be kind of a process along a timeline for this to work smoothly, which I certainly agreed with. And they also put us in touch with folks in the Department of Health and Safety because, you know, another one of the tasks is to, you know, we're trying to develop all sorts of inspection, building safety standards, which don't necessarily exist in most of the towns it doesn't sound like, but they do follow whatever the state rights are there from the fire inspection so we can get hold of that as well after we talk to those folks. Thanks, Tom. Tim, I want to kick it over to you if you don't mind me putting you on the spot. Can you hear me all right? Again. Thanks. I have a couple of different mutes to have happen. Well, I mean, thank you to Mark and Tom and whoever else was involved for talking to VLCT because as I tried to point out at the last meeting, my experience tends to come from Rattleboro. Rattleboro has a very specific population, which does represent few towns in our state, but not indicative of the whole state, of course. So many towns in our state just rely on state regulations, state voting rules, states, edicts to come to, you know, what the rules are in their particular towns. I want to say that the speed at which this is expected to happen is, as I think we all know on the committee, pretty quick. And so it's tough for anything to happen in a democratic fashion throughout the towns and then have it be because we are a Dillon's rule state. It has to go back, literally has to go back to the state where we changed our ordinances here in Rattleboro. And I want people to really understand that in Rattleboro, Vermont, a town of 12,000 people and a strong municipal government and 150 full-time equivalent employees, if we want to change a traffic light configuration or a parking sign or a stop sign, it needs approval from the state. That's Dillon's rule. So it's frustrating to town when things are pushed through so quickly that it has no hope of really getting a good democratic consideration from it. But as I started out saying, talking to the LCT is wonderful because they have a bigger picture of what's happening throughout all towns, and that's their job, and they're good at it. And I wanted to just, since I wasn't asked a specific question, it was just kick to me, just make sure that everybody understands that as far as on the taxes side, because we can kind of split it into taxes and fees, there was this unsuccessful push last year that I was involved in to try to get the legislature to understand that a local tax portion would be the fairest way to go about doing this. And it was not successful. So I want to make it clear that only about a dozen, from my understanding, maybe contains 16, because some towns are rapidly trying to adopt what's called a local option sales tax. That would give us not 1%, but two-thirds of 1% of retail sales that are. We would tack on, here in Brattleboro, we've managed to do it after much consternation. We've tacked on 1% local option sales of the statewide 6% tax on certain items. It's now 7% in Brattleboro. It is administered by the state as per their rules. And so we get two-thirds of 1% of taxable items. It's proved to be a wise decision in my opinion for Brattleboro because it also includes places like Amazon and it's online ordering, which as you know, we did it right before the pandemic and a lot of people order through those sites. So it was very wise to Brattleboro. It's helped. It goes into our general tax revenue and it's a huge help here in Brattleboro. So Brattleboro is slightly luckier than other towns in Vermont because we will get our two-thirds of 1% of the retail sales. However, other towns who have not done that and it is a lot of work to get it through to convince your residents that I want the temple block. That's a good idea. They didn't see marijuana coming. I think they certainly didn't see a pandemic coming. So they're not as lucky. They will not be getting any direct taxation. However, you want to call it relief support because I encourage this committee to call it. So it falls to fees. And so when you'll need that, the technicals are expected and able to charge when an application is made on the local level to self-campus at whatever capacity. Tim, that's my little joke. Just to follow up on that. I know no decisions have been made at the subcommittee level at the board. Obviously at the board committee level when it comes to fees. But I think the subcommittee was looking at it from the perspective of allowing towns to impose a fee up to a maximum dollar amount basis where the town could decide what it thinks is necessary or prudent up to a certain threshold. There's a couple different numbers kicked around in the subcommittee meeting. And I don't think it's wise that I necessarily repeat them here because they never really followed through on a specific number. But that was the thinking that that subcommittee from my understanding was moving in that direction. Okay. Thanks for the info. Yeah. Yeah, just a note on the speed. It's just all moving so quickly that I literally haven't been able to schedule a meeting with the LCT to really understand their perspective on the multiple towns. And as you know, we have a round table coming up next week. Yeah. Carrie, I know I have a question. Yeah. Tim, this is for you and it is primarily for discussion. I have no opinion in this regard. I just heard some of the discussion in the legislature about when they were talking about tax. There was a discussion about excluding towns that opted out. And I was wondering what your opinion was on that. So the discussion in the legislature, the pieces of it that I heard, they did have other bills that I was paying more attention to. But they talked about if a town opted in, they would have access to the additional tax. And if they opted out a retail sale, they would not. It's not my understanding that towns have been given any of that. Correct. No, I understand that. But I heard that as part of the push. There was discussion. And I was just curious as to your thoughts on if they opted in. It was sort of incentivizing the opt-in scenario with additional tax fees. I mean, that's another whole question I didn't want to get into the rabbit hole of whether opt-in or opt-out is a truly democratic way to go about doing that. Because that was a decision that was made that ultimately I'm not sure that train has already left the station in my opinion. I think it's important to understand that towns don't really feel like they have much control at the moment of what's moving forward. Thanks, Tim. Julie, I know you're with us. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I'm listening in a place where you might feel comfortable helping inform this committee what's going to be helpful for your round table. Don't hesitate to jump in. Tim, I would imagine that rough number from the market structure committee on that maximum fee number might be helpful for those discussions. I know that you know from a zoning perspective what traditionally can be looked at from a commercial product or commercial presence in your town in that perspective. I wanted to make sure that you were aware. I'm fairly sure that 164 gives municipalities also authority to regulate odor through from a nuisance perspective. Another interesting thing came up in our sustainability committee meeting yesterday. We were talking about energy standards that were given to us by the public service department and even myself with environmental policy masters. I feel like I got a master's level class in electrical engineering. I'm sure you probably feel the same listening to that conversation. But what came up was like the dark skies rule, which I think is what California refers to it as. And I know that, you know, it's something that's talked about in the context of Massachusetts. But if you're thinking about a greenhouse grow or an outdoor grow with lights, you know, cycling those those lights that after hours, you know, 12pm to 6am. I'm wondering if discussion are at the roundtable around what I know that in the state of Vermont, that's typically those types of ordinances are typically done at the local level. I think it's harder to enforce those. It's what I've heard, but it might be worth carrying that conversation to that roundtable as well. And I've carried in the room and Dave in the room. If you have any thoughts or experiences with with that, you know, I know that the aesthetic value and lights from a 250 context. It's also something that's considered when a product falls into the 250 jurisdiction. But something to think about and consider in addition to your traditional commercial zoning abilities as a municipality. I appreciate that it, you know, really comes down to capacity of towns and how we all all of us who live in a Vermont town are familiar with property taxes. And if Browbro is going to have an increased need to be thinking about builders and lighting at night and things like that, that require another staff member, right? So that's that's building capacity which falls into costs. And if the sales doesn't support the cost of towns, it's essentially an unfunded mandate, which we're used to. But it certainly is not a democratic and kind way to go for the citizens of Browbro. No, I appreciate that. I respect the perspective that you're coming from. I just wanted to make sure that you are aware that those could be treated or other than your traditional boxes that you check off of from a commercial zoning perspective. It might be wise to bring those to those other unique to potentially this industry requirements to up to your roundtable discussion. You know, I know that we're moving fast to him, but we also don't have any real products or anything in writing to help facilitate your roundtable. I'm just trying to think of other things that might be helpful if that's going to happen still next week. And I can follow up with Julie offline. Yeah, I'm sort of her baby, but I'm very appreciative for her. So no pride of ownership over that. I'm happy to share the responsibility. And I guess really what some of what you've talked about already, Tim, is what should come up in the roundtable in terms of what are the costs. And I think that that was the question last week. And I can't remember if it was compliance and enforcement or market structure, like what what are the costs that towns are looking at or concerned about that we need to look at. Yeah, Tim, that's thanks Julie for jogging my memory. I know that market structure subcommittee members wanted to know if that fee was going to be higher on that maximum scale, they needed to see for what. So having that kind of punch list to bring back to that committee in this committee, I think might help justify a higher fee if that's a direction that, you know, municipalities want to go in. I can certainly help get that together based most conveniently for me on on Brattle Bros. But then we'll try to do a survey using roundtable next week. Great. Okay, I want to shift gears completely into a retail enforcement conversation. Last meeting, the subcommittee did did vote unanimously to charge the board with looking towards an MOU with the agency about outdoor and indoor cultivation. There's a lot of other links in that chain that need to be talked about from an enforcement perspective where we have the pleasure of having Skyler and Brandon here from the Department of Liquor and Lottery to give us a presentation on how they look to enforce retail from a tobacco and liquor perspective. So I'm going to give it over to Skyler. Skyler, we've got about 20 ish minutes. If your presentation is running ahead of schedule. I know Dave and Kerry also do some retail enforcement through what they're doing to do bag. I'd like to hear what you're doing. We've got a couple different options the board should and could consider here, but we wanted to start with liquor and lottery. So, Skyler, I'll turn it over to you. Okay, thanks Kyle. Can you hear me okay? Yep. Okay, good. I appreciate your time and I won't take it for 20 minutes. You know, I can speak passionately about what we do for hours, but I appreciate you all have a tight timeline and a very important mission. So I'll make the best use of my time before you today. Hello, everyone. I've met some of you. I haven't met all of you. My name is Skyler Gines. In the room physically is Brandon King. I'm the director of the Office of Compliance and Enforcement for the Division of Liquor Control. Brandon is one of our field supervisors. Skipping really quickly through, I can remember how to navigate there. It's a little bit of my background. I've been in law enforcement for about a little over 16 years. I started working at UVM Police, came to the state in 2013. Here to tell you today about how the Department of Liquor and Lottery handles retail compliance and enforcement, which is the core mission of my team. We have four offices at Liquor and Lottery, particularly in the Division of Liquor Control, Office of Compliance and Enforcement, our division, the Office of Education, the Office of Licensing and our retail arm. Obviously, you have to talk to you about how we go about in our operating philosophy around compliance and enforcement, the retail sale of alcohol and tobacco products. Here's my team, quick picture of us. There's about 11 investigators working across the state. Each cover a dispersed area of responsibility. Really, from the start, I want to let you all know we are certified level three law enforcement officers, but that's one of a couple hats that we wear. We are given law enforcement authority under Title VII, Section 561. It gives us a similar authority as the Vermont State Police under Title XX. But again, like I mentioned, that's just one of the hats we wear. And frankly, it's not the hat we wear the most. I would say we wear a regulatory enforcement hat more than anything else. But here's just a list of several things we do. But the important thing is that we focus on our core mission, which is, again, protecting public safety through safe use of beverage alcohol and tobacco products in the state. We have a statutory compulsion to enforce the rules and laws around Title VII, which obviously the cannabis laws fall into, which is an interesting nexus, because I firmly believe that there are very different substances, you know, tobacco, cannabis, alcohol, all very different with its own unique challenges. My office goes about our operational philosophy in three core key programs. The first is our minor compliance program, and that's your, you probably may know us best for that, where we actually hire minors to enter establishments to attempt to purchase regulated substances under age. The second program we operate in is a regulatory inspection program. And thirdly is investigations, and that's often where we put on our criminal law enforcement hat when we engage in criminal investigative activity. I'm going to go through each one of these programs, give a brief overview. The first are minoring. When I say compliance, I often mean minor compliance. So you can, those are anonymous. We engage in those on both tobacco and alcohol. Interestingly enough, tobacco is statutorily required by our office to conduct one, at least one minor compliance check at every tobacco license within the state of Vermont in the year. There is no statutory compulsion for alcohol, but we believe in the model. So we apply it as much as we possibly can with resources that we have. We also engage in some contracted compliance work for the federal government, for the FDA, on the tobacco side. And we've recently started an online compliance program for tobacco to address retail delivery of tobacco products into the state, which is prohibited. On the alcohol side, we test full on-premise establishments, which you can think of bars, restaurants as your program, typical on-premise. We also test off-premise, convenience stores, grocery stores, things of that nature. And we also test other outlets, farmers markets, manufacturing locations, things of that nature. Talk a little bit about tobacco compliance under Title VII, subsection 107B. Again, it's statutorily required that we do this work. It looks, it's a fairly simple program. Investigators recruit minors, they become temporary employees of the state. We train those minors on internal protocols, rules of engagement, if you will. Two investigators will go accompany a minor and we'll send them into establishment and ask them to purchase tobacco products. They do not lie, they're insured that they're not allowed to lie. They use their actual issued state identification card. We build the program so that it is as easy as possible for our retail establishments to identify that this is a person who's a prohibited sale and that they should refuse the sale. We observe, undercover of the attempt in the perfect world. We want to see a sale refusal and we check the training of the clerk and we let them know that they passed a compliance check. Unfortunately, about 10% of the time the sale will be made to the minors and then we take simple enforcement action on the clerk for selling the product to the minor under Title VII and we can, we do have a schedule, a waiver schedule of penalties for the establishment of that failed compliance check. Same thing on alcohol. The only difference is it's not statutorily required. The program looks almost identical. Of no, I will say with our alcohol compliance program, it was interestingly enough tested by the Vermont Supreme Court in the early 2000s and stood to test that it was constitutional and prohibited or allowed, not prohibited under law. And I can share that case law with anyone who's interested. The second core pillar of our program is the inspection model. It can be as in-depth as a full-on business audit. Often it's as non-invasive as observing operations and ensuring that they're complying with all the regulations and laws as established by either Title VII or the Board of Liquor and Lottery. You know, we have about 52 general regulations that we enforce as imposed by the Board. You know, they're very simple, can be as simple as making sure that licenses are home on the wall. The real key one, the one we focus on a lot, is our server and seller education to make sure that servers and sellers are trained. The statute requires that every two years anyone engaging in the sale of beverage, alcohol or tobacco products are trained either by our department or using certified third-party trainers. And then obviously we look for observations for intoxicated patrons, youth around the establishment or any criminal activity that could occur there. The third pillar that I mentioned was our, you know, our law enforcement officer had most of the time follow-up investigations. We'll often get complaints from the public about criminal activity that occurs in and around our licensed establishments. Could be anything from gambling to human trafficking to tax violation, tax fraud. And when we receive those complaints, we have a standing mandate within our division. We investigate all complaints that we receive. But we don't do it alone. We partner with partner agencies either law enforcement or non. It's a big mission set. We've got around 7,000 licenses active at any given day. So we do certainly use our support network to complete those. This slide doesn't render very well, but I want to tell you really quickly about the operational philosophy that we use. We make all of our decisions at the Office of Compliance and Enforcement based on data. It's a weekly data-driven decision-making model. And we do that using some technology. So we have a program called Project Rabbit. It's an acronym. It stands for Resource Allocation based on an Intelligence Toolkit. The problem statement, as you can see there, is I only have 11 field investigators covering the entire state with 7,000 outlets serving tobacco and alcohol at any given day. We need help to know where we need to be at the right time. Before we had technology to help us with this, we were relying on gut instinct or at best or randomness at worst. So this data was non-existent before we fully embraced this paradigm. But once we brought Project Rabbit on, we built an iOS mobile application that collects data in the field. Our investigators collect very granular data about all of their activities. Then we use that collected data and we connect it to other disparate data sets to help paint the pictures of where problem establishments are across the state. We connect to health department data. They do a number of surveys that we use to help better build our program, support the data that we collect. We collect DUI data which is hugely important for us in terms of beverage alcohol of use in certain areas of the state. So those two programs together make it for us and help us visualize that data. I'm going to skip over here really quickly. The program is based on a science and public health approach. We partnered with a number of different researchers to help wait algorithms to again predict where we'd be the most effective across the state. We can look at Project Rabbit live. I don't think that's super useful for you all today but I'd like to leave as much questions in time for questions that you might have for me as possible but maybe I can sort of demo that program for you. Thank you, Skyler. I can't see everybody with the way that our system is set up here. So if you want to like, I'm sharing your screen that would be great for me. Yes, absolutely. I want to open it up to NACB and the subcommittee members. Any questions? Any questions for Skyler and Brandon? Skyler, thank you for your presentation. I feel like you have a really good understanding of your processes and your methods. I think this was on an earlier slide and then again on that problem data slide. If you could just give me just another field for how large is your department and then another field for the market place that you're dealing with. You had a slide there that was talking about kind of score footage that you're covering the two things that I was interested in. Yeah, so that's statewide. That's just a score mileage of the state of Vermont from that statewide jurisdiction. So we cover the entire state. So, you know, market fluctuates drastically day-to-day to different licenses of permits that the org issues. You know, the summer months can become very busy. For certain times of the winter months can become very, very busy. You look at waiting events such as special events, festivals, farmers markets, things of that nature. But a good figure is that we have around 7,000 outlets selling either alcohol or tobacco products in any given day. Very quick to make a second. Go ahead. This is the size of the department. OCE, my team. 11 field investigators I'm sorry, four supervisors and a chief. That's the entire department size in terms of field work. Obviously we have a number of partner divisions within liquor and lottery, our education division, our licensing division and our retail operations. I think total though between liquor and lottery I think we only have, and please don't quote me somewhere around 80 total employees for the department. Any questions? Ingrid, go ahead. Thanks chief. That was helpful. I think my question is similar to Tom's but I'm trying to get a sense of what your caseload is for an annual caseload of an investigator. Yeah. I'm the first one to say it's a lot. So let's take products individually. There's around 900 tobacco licenses in the state. So we have statutorily 100 tobacco compliance checks that we have to conduct within the year. Alcohol, no statutory mandate but we believe in the model so we try and apply it as comprehensively as we can. We conduct those checks quarterly and we have some requirements about how many checks get done quarterly. Regulatory inspections, we have a standing work rule that we expect at least three inspections to be done weekly and those are strategic inspections so we use that Power BI model to help tell us where to go inspect. And then investigations that fluctuates very widely depending on public complaints referrals from partner law enforcement agencies. So it's varied. Brandon is a fairly new supervisor with us. He came from the University of Vermont Police interestingly also he could speak more specifically to what day to day looks like any given day in a long liquor investigator's world is never the same. We're always triaging priorities and kind of juggling the needs that are the most most stringent but we always, at least since I've been here eight years, we've never not met our statutory obligation back with compliance and we believe that's really important. So. Skyler, I think if I can distill it down, I think you gave me a figure last time we had a conversation that was about for every inspector they're covering 60 to 70 different license holders. That's our comfortable zone. I think some, you know we're often way outside of it depending, but that's where our scope of control and controls are on board. Scope of responsibility is probably the most comfortable. Carrie, any other questions? Yeah, Skyler, hi. I've got Carrie here with the agency today. And most of our penalties are civil. We do have the ability to go criminal not as direct as yours and just wondering I mean in my tenure at the agency we've gone that criminal route twice. I wonder how often you guys go go use civil and how often you use the criminal. Yeah, actually I'll throw in another one that I may have neglected in my presentation. The board has the authority to administer administrative penalties. So that's our primary method of enforcement is administrative penalties. It's ours too. Sometimes I stand for ours too. Gotcha. That's about 90% of our enforcement actions. That's around 300 administrative tickets a year. Civil penalties go to the individual and that varies depending on how many failures we have. So those are clerks who will sell products to minors. And then criminal actions. Those aren't always directly related to sale and service of beverage, alcohol or tobacco because we have full criminal authority. Those could be anything from a DUI arrest in the parking lot to a gambling charge for a nonprofit which we do some regulation on. So I'll give you a figure. We generally make around 14 to 20 criminal arrests a year but that's not always directly related to retail sale of beverage, alcohol or tobacco. No, thank you. Just curious. Ashley or Tim, any questions for Skyler? I just had a couple when it comes to the data collection. When did you guys start doing data collection? And then how often is that data analyzed? Yeah, so we started in 2017 right around March of 2017 and I would say that data is analyzed daily. So that model that we use, Project Rabbit refreshes every three hours actually. So we're constantly feeding it fresh information. We're letting the algorithm dictate particularly our inspection activity based on the data sets that it's connected to. So it's very frequently updated and analyzed model. Tim, I think you're on mute. I just wanted to add one more thing. When we're thinking about adapting this to cannabis, liquor and lottery is not startup and this is. I'm curious. I see a little bit of a disconnect between analyzing data which doesn't exist using a period of time to collect data and then figuring out how we're going to analyze that. So that's where I'm at thinking like obviously try to true this is the program that's been working for a long time but how are we going to use that to jump here into cannabis. So maybe everyone, that's what we're thinking of as well but that's a huge question of mine. Absolutely. What I would say is our strategic model didn't come online until 2018. We actually used the 2017 year as a control year so we collected data for an entire year before we even started analyzing it and letting it drive decision making. So we really didn't want to have a good comprehensive data set to start with. Thank you. Just wanted to say thank you Chief for a very crisp and efficient presentation. It just reminds me of the old adage of trying to fly the plane while you're building it. So we need that going on. Just so I'm clear about the rabbit program is it strategic in that it directs your assets like it helps direct where your time is best spent and what are some of the factors that you think go into that algorithm? Yeah, so there's a lot. There's around 17 individual data sets that go into the algorithm but there are some that are more confident than others and we relied on that public health research-based approach to help kind of weight those algorithms. So one that's huge for us, the National Institutes of Health that are a pretty well-sighted study saying proximity to schools is a huge predictive factor for negative outcomes in a community when there's a liquor license establishment close proximity to a school. So we really wanted to use that data. The problem with us is that we actually haven't collected proximity to schools since the 1980s in terms of liquor licensing but we are not. The Department of Health does a countertools data survey yearly and they actually collect that information. So we were able to connect to countertools data through the Department of Health correlated to our liquor license establishments and then weight where they follow the algorithm based on that proximity to school. Another one we rely on hugely is DUI data. Through the Fermat Forensic Laboratory we actually have real-time connection to the DMT data master data so we get real-time DUI IRS data so we can see where their spikes or trends in DUI arresting in any one community and then in liquor license establishments based on their location in that community we'll get a little bit more attention from our investigators based on that data. 17 data sets is a lot. We can weight through them all but I can tell you that control year data what we found was with our inspection model is the KPI that we used was violations for inspection so about 2 out of every 100 inspections we would find a violation. When we went to that strategic model starting in 2018 we jumped to 15 percent so it really showed tremendous increasing in our effectiveness in the field by letting again not randomness or investigator comfortability drive our decision making but letting data actually tell us where we can help and let me be really clear when I say this just because the strategic model tells us where to go it's not about writing more tickets. Matter of fact we actually have written less tickets in the year since we brought Project Rabbit on. The goal always is to identify problems before they get out of hand work with the licensees and hopefully cut significant issues off before they occur we're the Office of Compliance and Enforcement for a reason we want to get to compliance long before we ever have to get to enforcement. Skylar I have a question or just maybe something to leave you and Brandon with to think about and we can pick it up again next week you know part of what you guys do you know through sting inspections or sending minors into establishments I think could make a good chunk of what you would help us with. I also want to recognize though that the stores or the retail establishments at least in the traditional retail dispensary context look quite different than a lot of the alcohol stores or places that you buy alcohol or tobacco in the state of Vermont. Other state that has a regulated market does things a little differently from holding your license from the time you step foot into place until you leave with whatever product but there's a lot more control over who's coming in and out of these establishments and that's something that we've got to tackle as a committee when it relates to security. So from a resource perspective how can you know just something for you guys to think about but also something for us to think about as a committee how can we right size how security is handled at a storefront retail establishment to make sure that you're not overly burdened from a from a resource perspective but also ensuring that there's a good culture of compliance when it comes to a retail establishment and those that are looking to actually purchase a product. Yeah, no, there's a myriad of issues there obviously. I think my perspective first in having visited dispensaries in Colorado and some other states I think really the best thing that the board could do in rules and regulations would be looking at potential educational requirements for people engaged in the sale or working security at those establishments I can tell you firsthand having done this work for a long time the quality of fake IDs out there is very scary I'm in a law enforcement officer for 16 years I can tell you that you can put a real high quality fake you can put a real ID next to a high quality fake and I can't tell the difference without running them through a law enforcement database that doesn't mean it's an impossible task there's some great training curriculum out there about how to read body cues because a person who's using a real ID versus a person who's using a fraudulent ID are very very different so there's techniques and tactics you can use to analyze the ID but there's also techniques and tactics you can use to read the patron so I think there's a lot of issues around that but I think really thinking about training requirements or certification even to a certain level for sellers and servers I'm the first one to say that my office would be engaged in an effort of futility if it wasn't for our education division our education division is really the BIP the rock star of our department Thanks Tyler, Dave I see your hand up before you put your hand up I know we're running out of time we're not expecting you and Kerry to kind of run the gamut of how you enforce from a retail perspective that the Agency of Agriculture I'd love to continue this conversation on Monday but feel free to ask your question for Skyler and then we're going to move to public comment Thank you Chief, much appreciated I'm your counterpart to Accorded Agency of Agriculture so nice to meet you I think internationally I've got a couple of questions for you all to make these as quick as possible it sounds from your presentation that you are looking at the site of sale for a lot of these do you ever follow the product after it leaves the retail establishment and if you do does that change your course of enforcement Do you mean I just want to make sure I understand your question follow the product as in you know, interdict sales that have occurred you know, not actually witnessed the sale but like come across products sold to help me understand a little better Sure, more of a legal sale or perhaps something that does occur legally but then once outside the store turns illegal so when you have the product the product would be the part that would be the illegal asset here as opposed to the point of sale so the sales happening legally what happened on the part a lot is illegal and you had mentioned that you can do a DUI on site what happens when the hey mister scheme turns into a hey kid here's your product Yeah, we actually do engage we do engage in that as much as we can obviously our focus we're hyper focused on our licensed establishments and the activity that occurs around those licensed areas but we routinely engage in those types of things spent several years now but we had a it makes some national press we had a heavy topper case where we interjected a sale of a large amount of heavy topper and a bargain lot we had a case of we routinely do smuggling cases because believe it or not Vermont still has smuggling laws on the books with our neighbors our tax free neighbors to the east so we do engage in some smuggling cases I wouldn't want to buy it as a large percentage of our work we do engage in those okay, very good on a complaint based system you would go after that as well complaint or just if our investigators happen to either develop their own information or observe that occurring out in the field okay, and then what are your statutory maximums for violation administratively and do you have a statutory maximum for enforcement action we do yeah, so the board can issue it's recently changed let me get back to you with the exact amount but I think it's around $7,000 per violation that the board of liquor and lottery can impose okay, with the ceiling per action as well we have a and I'm less familiar with it because the board has actually delegated a waiver penalty schedule to our team so when we observe routine violations we can issue an administrative ticket in the form of a waiver penalty it's much much smaller than the maximum and then we have the discretion in the field that if it's an egregious offense or maybe a repeat offense we can then notice them for hearing before the board where they'd be looking at the full penalty instead of the waiver penalty so when it's in the field and you give a citation that would not be going through a penalty matrix that would be a predetermined penalty based on the the back of the ticket basically that's right do you have or a theory inspection ticket in my world do you have anything that would be like a penalty matrix or any more egregious or severe offenses if it's above what the officer feels comfortable issuing a waiver penalty for we push it to the board for a full enforcement hearing and then the last thing I have is what administrative enforcement actions can you engage in once you reach that board level would it be automatic hearing citation in the field or you don't feel comfortable so go straight to the hearing are there any in between tools that you can utilize I guess the stratum of enforcement tools we have would be like a verbal warning a written warning a waiver penalty administrative ticket and then the next step would be a full notice to hear and that hearing before the board would be they would be looking at either fines for violation or the suspension or revocation of their license thank you chief alright thanks everybody I think we had one public comment but they decided to hold their comments for a future meeting and we're going to slide right in at a time I'd love to continue the retail enforcement conversation next week and if you can think about how it can be and further help to the minimum school round table over the weekend I'd love to preserve some time to talk about that on Monday and then I'd also like to start wandering into security and what that means both from a physical location perspective, cash management perspective so on and so forth so Tom maybe you and I can connect ahead of that meeting or we can start finding ways to attack that in small bits over the course of the next double meeting just a logistics note if you don't mind I am unable to make Monday's meeting because I have a regular job with face money but I will prepare something using some advice from DLCT and our own town manager and a couple of other folks around the area so I'll be able to give you some at least bullet points for your Monday meeting I appreciate that and thank you for seeing everybody on Monday if I could get a motion to adjourn so we'll second thank you everybody