 Now in Senate government operations on Tuesday, May 12th, and we're doing a couple of things. We're going to do a couple of things that aren't exactly on the agenda today. We're looking at these three buckets, the transitioning to maybe more normal, what we need to put in place so that we don't get caught in such a scurry again if this happens again, and then things that we learned that could become permanent or that we could apply going forward. Today, we're looking at those issues around the elections, the military, and then we're going to look at the charter change from Weathersfield. I also sent out a note to see if we could look at H947, which it just passed the house, it was referred to us this morning. We probably don't even really have it yet, but it is here and it is one of those COVID related things that should happen, and we'll talk about that later. I don't know if it's Betsy or Tucker. I think it's Tucker that has that one, because it's a municipal related issue. Let's start looking at the, is that your understanding committee and everybody about what we're doing today? Okay. I don't hear any of the sense, but I guess everybody agrees. Let's start with looking at the elections. What I would like to do actually is, since there still is this hanging out there issue around the November election, is start with a little conversation about that, and then lesson learned and how we're going to, I'm not sure that there's much of a transition to make around the elections. But there might be some permanent changes that could be made. I'll just so that I shared an email with Chris and Secretary Condos and Will this morning, and I'm going to tell you what I said, because it's probably the wackiest idea ever, but I dreamt it, so I'm sure it's brilliant. When I read the governor's letter, it seemed to me that the governor was saying, go ahead, get everything prepared, do it, and then the final ballots can't be printed until after the primary anyway. But everything else can be printed. All the envelopes, because we're going to need those anyway, so get everything ready, and then in August, figure out, do we need to mail out ballots or not? I would urge us all to not talk about this as a vote by mail, because it's not a vote by mail. This is a mailing out the ballots. The voting can be done by mail or it can be done by going to the polls or anything else. If we say vote by mail, a lot of people out there are thinking, I won't be able to go to the polls. I have to vote by mail and that isn't true. Even if we mail out a ballot to everybody, that isn't the case. So I would urge us all to stop using vote by mail. So my thought in reading that letter was that he said, go ahead and get prepared, which in my mind means sign the contracts, get the mailing houses set up, buy the post, the indicias, print them on there, do everything, get everything ready, and in August to get the contract signed for the mail houses, the printing, everything, after the primary, if then the decision is made to mail them out. I may be all wrong here, but everything will be printed and it can be mailed because it's all printed. And I suggested right after the primary, sending out or printing before the primary, getting as part of the preparation, you're doing two postcards. One postcard would be a tear-off postcard that goes to every registered voter that says, that's a tear-off that you send in to ask for your ballot to be mailed to you. The other one is a postcard that's going to go to every single voter that says we're going to be mailing you a ballot and this is what you can do with your ballot. You can mail it back, you can take it to the polls, you can do whatever you want with it. So have those two postcards prepared, ready and ready to send out and then send one of them. That was my suggestion. I don't know that that would even work and I know that I haven't had a chance to even run this by Will and Will is the brains behind this. So I apologize for kind of just springing this on us, but I do think that that is part of the preparation and that can happen. And then in August, the ballots are either sent out or people request them and they're all labeled and mailed and ready to go anyway. And the town, if I request one from my town clerk, my town clerk can have them sent out from the Secretary of State's office. I mean, I don't know if that works or not, but anyway, that's my suggestion and I'd like to hear from other people and what's going on. And I really think that the governor's letter just said, get everything ready. That's the way I read it. So Will, Chris. Yes, Senator, thank you. Maybe I'll just start real quick. You want to say anything? We should listen to Will on the. I'm sorry, can you hear me? This is Chris. Can you hear me? Kind of. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank, thanks, Senator. I thought maybe I would start really quickly here and Will's setting can, of course, chime in on some of the practical implications of what you're suggesting, but just to back up a little bit and give everybody the background. We did propose a directive to Governor Scott that will allow us to do for the primary kind of the normal approach with a very ramped up approach to voting by mail through absentee ballot requests and we would really pump that up. The primary is a different election. It's a not as well attended election. We think we can preserve the safety of for the August primary given the numbers and in using the absentee ballot request system for November, which is going to be a much heavier turnout. Our approach would be to mail a ballot to every registered voter, every active registered voter and give them that option of voting by mail or voting at polling places, meaning that polling places will still remain open. People can make their choice at that time. What the governor has said is that he doesn't want to make that decision right now and he wants to make that decision after the August primary. And so we've responded back saying that put us in a very difficult position and we're waiting on a further response from the governor. We're hoping that we can work with governor to alleviate some of those concerns. But our focus as it has been from the very beginning and Secretary Kondo says this when he starts every one of these conversations is we want to preserve every room honors right to vote and we want to protect the health and safety of voters, town clerks and election workers. So that doesn't have to be a choice there between protecting your health and protecting your right to vote. The governor has, the governor and his health experts have said there's no way to predict what the status of the virus is going to be in November or even September or October. And everyone is advising a lot of the experts, the health experts, the federal experts, the state experts are advising there will be a resurgence is a very high likelihood of a resurgence in the fall. So we don't want to wait until August to make a decision. And as you said, Senator White, the governor has essentially said, we agree, you need to be planning, you need to be making the preparations. But he still doesn't want to make that call right yet as to whether we have to have whether we should be mailing a ballot to every active registered voter in November. We already have deadlines that will can talk to that you've heard before. I think we have deadlines to prepare, procure and implement our contracts, our suppliers, our paper, our vendors, our envelope printing contracts. All of that needs to happen this month for November. So we need certainty. We've gotten some certainty out of the governor by saying he thinks we ought to do this, but he's also at the same time saying we could possibly change our minds in August. And that's a really difficult position for us. We've asked the governor to provide us with additional information. How he thinks this information on the ground is going to change in August. By waiting until August, we firmly believe that voters ought to have the power to decide how they exercise the right to vote in November, in September, October, November, and that we need to make that decision now so that we can start planning with the clerks. We can start communicating with the general public to alleviate any confusion so that we can get those contracts in place with certain things that we can put our teams to work with. So to some extent, I totally agree with Senator White that the governor has given us the green light to proceed, but we still have that uncertainty lurking in the background with a decision in August that could possibly pull that back on us and throw everything into turmoil. And Will can explain to you why it would be really problematic for him, for his team, for the vendors, for town clerks if we reverse course so late in the game, although we're proposing a potential offer for that with the governor and we're working on a compromise to help alleviate his concerns about making a decision too early. I guess at this point, I would just turn it over to Will to talk about some of the practical implications of not having a firm decision yet and proceeding as though we do. And of course, he's the one who has to implement this with the town clerks, with all of the contracts and vendors that he's been working really hard on this for a couple of months already. So I guess if it's all right with the chair, I turn it over to Will at this point. Yeah, that would be fine. Thank you, Will. And I do apologize to you, Will, for not kind of running this by you first, but and just putting it in your lap right now. You're muted, Will. You're muted. Madam Chair, hello. I'm checking in. Sorry, I had something ran over and and then I'm a little trouble connecting. You'll be you'll be reassured to know you're not the only one who ever has connection problems. Yes, we all have problems today. We all have problems connecting today. Yeah. And something ran over. You didn't run something over. Not that I'm aware of that. I thought maybe you ran over a skunk or something. No, that was in that was in caucus. I ran over a skunk, not here. No, no problems. OK, well, well. Yes, thank you. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Yes. OK, I have issues with the speakers on my laptop. So I'm doing the testimonies day through my iPhone. So we'll see how that goes, but so far so good. And Madam Chair, I appreciate that acknowledgment that sort of I wasn't necessarily prepared for that hypothesis and scenario and responding to it. So but I'm happy to I understand how times are right now. But just know that affects the quality of my answer in the moment, I guess, is how I would put the thoroughness of my answer. I already be pardon me for interrupting it. Let me just can Madam Chair, can you restate the hypothesis or whatever this thing he's responding to so that his answer makes sense? I don't I'm sorry. I missed it. What's the question? So I I last night in a nutshell woke up. I just lost everybody. OK, there there you're back and Jeanette, except for Chris, but the problem being frozen. What? You know, I am frozen part of your describing. You had been I can't hear you of the meeting. You were frozen. Oh, you guys keep we just let the chair. Should I go up and come back? No, you're coming through. Well, should I go out and come back? Am I frozen now? You're fine. No, you're fine. You're fine now for me. You're fine. Well, let me know. Let me know if if something happens and I can you because I can't tell. So Chris Bray, what? What can you hear me? I did you hear me? Is somebody let the chair speak? Somebody keeps saying, can you? Somebody keeps saying, can you hear me? Me, I'm here. I'm curious if my audio and everything is. No, it keeps going in and out for me. So can I can I restate it very briefly? So my understanding, Chris Bray, was that the governor's letter said, go ahead, do everything you need to do to make this happen, except pull the trigger. That's the way I read it. Do all the printing, make all, do all the contracts, pay the contractors, get everything set, do everything. So I suggested that kind of a compromise position might be then to also print two sets of postcards. One set of postcards would be, and they would go out after the primary. One set of postcards would be something with a tear off that said, send this in to request your ballot. The other set of postcards would be a postcard that says, we're going to mail everybody a ballot and here's what you can do with it. You can do one of these three things. And so my guess is that after the primary happens, the position is going to be that we cannot have a regular election. And so it's that, but we're prepared to do either one in that case. And I know that I just tossed this at Will and Chris this morning. So it isn't well thought out. And I do think that there is, I know there's people who talked about an education that needs to happen for voters. I don't think the general population pays any attention to the process of the general election until after the primary. So I think if we start talking about the two different systems before the primary, that it's going to be confusing for people. And that, I mean, how many people do you know that worry about the general election until after the primaries open over? And people are going to be so tired of campaigning this year that they aren't going to want to hear it. So anyway, that's my, that Chris is what I had suggested. Thank you. Sorry to make you back up and explain. No, that's fine. Thank you. So Will. Yes. Please let me know if anybody can't hear me at any point doing this through my phone. We will. There's a lot there to respond to Senator White. So I'm going to try and start with the most specific thing, which is that to conduct the statewide mailing to all the voters, to every voter of a particular ballot for them, you're right, the ballot printing is probably the easiest part of that is a simple part. It's what we do all the time. And that always waits until after the primary. One minor piece is that we have to and already have ordered significantly more stock, ballot stock to those general election ballots on, because if you're going to mail one to every registered voter and the 550,000 active voters, you also need to have additional ballots available for the polling place. They need to print more than enough. You need to print two for some voters in some cases because they're going to mail one to everybody. As you mentioned, everybody is not required to and may not return that ballot either by mail or in person and they can show up at the polling place. So you need additional stock at the polling place. I'll set that aside for right now. The ballots are the easy part. The mailing house process is the very difficult and complex part and I think you get that too. And that's why everybody's telling us to prepare, prepare, prepare, go ahead, enter the contracts, spend probably 300,000 to $600,000 doing that. But that process is very complex. I've reached out to, we have two printers that print our ballots. It's a redundancy measure so that if anything ever happened to one of them in the lead up to the election, the other could take over. What's become clear as I'm planning this process is that it's going to be ideal for the mailing to actually happen from each of those different printers. The ballots that that printer prints will get mailed from that location and the other from the other. Makes sense for a lot of reasons from an efficiency standpoint. Both of them have told me that they need to know whether we're moving forward and doing this by the end of this month. No later than, would rather know now. The, in the communications around that, the explanation for that is that there are many pieces to put in place to make sure that this happens in a timely manner in September. So we would, we will are going to and we'll have to enter into those contracts and do all of that work. All of that coordination involves, I think I've described you before, significant work on our end on our program inside with the company who provides my election management software to account for this new process. That involves the ability to enter all of these, every voter in Vermont as having been sent a ballot at the same time. So that our clerks don't have to go in and individually do that for every voter on their checklist which is the process now under the current system because they get requests one by one on a rolling basis and do it for each voter. We develop a file that's gonna come out of that voter, election management system, that's essentially our voter checklist but with additional information that those printers will need. The ballot style that's assigned to each of those voters, the mailing address that they will have included in either their request or their voter record. So it's just setting up the fields in that file in the way that's most ideal to allow the printers to do this very complex mailing again. This is all to say that if we were, and I guess I'll step back, I guess you all probably know that I just think it's a very, very bad idea to leave this decision until after the primary in August. I think it's untenable, frankly. We're gonna go ahead and put those contracts and those systems in place on the assumption that we're doing it. If we were to decide not to after the primary, the only other option at that point is for the clerks to do this process from their offices. I cannot do this, the particular answer to kind of your idea from last night. We cannot do from the state level, the rolling requests. These mailing houses are gonna get this all set up and it's a massive job. And they're thinking about, you run one set of ballot styles at one time, the envelopes that go with them, you pair them together. There is no way that they will be standing on standby with the whole mailing operation for a three month period doing single ballot combining for us or even big batches. I'm giving an example that comes up already with the current plan. We're gonna send all the ballots out to all the voters and one of the things that I need to plan among the many, for instance, with those mailing houses and that will affect the size of the contract and the scope of the contract is whether or not they do follow-up mailings at any iterative basis for new registrants or for people who haven't returned the ballot yet. My current approach to that is, no, they're gonna do a single mailing in September and the clerks will take care of the dribbles that come in. It's another reason why we need additional ballots printed for those dribbles. We can't do that from the state. My staff obviously can't. There's four of us dealing with everything else we're dealing with with elections and we can't send absentee ballots to the entire registered voter population. Even on the rolling request basis, we expect a significant amount of requests by absentee ballot this year. So it's doing it with those contracts we had set up and in place with the mailing houses in September or asking the clerks to do it on a request basis, essentially like they currently do now. And that's the sort of most targeted way that I can say why that doesn't make sense. In terms of voter education, I have to disagree with you. I'm sorry. My feeling is that the primary is gonna happen as the primary happens. There's no real education, there's no real education associated with that at this point, especially because we're designing right now this postcard with a tear-off request that we're gonna send in June to all the active voters. We're taking that additional step for August now. It's been amazing to me to learn over the last month as the debate about what we're gonna do has played out across the state, how little people know about our current process and how much confusion there is about absentee voting. So we wanna take the time now to communicate that they're gonna be sent a ballot in November and without having any change to the process in August, I think that that's doable. It's not, it's the one change that's happening. November is also gonna play out exactly the way it is for everybody except for the fact that everybody's gonna get a ballot put under their nose with a return envelope to the clerk. I can leave it there for now and open it up to questions or more thoughts from the committee, I think at this point. So does Paul, did you wanna weigh in here? I mean, I think we know what you're gonna say but would you like to weigh in and you're on mute? Yes, sorry. I would love to speak briefly, Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the record, Paul Burns. We thank you, Director of V-PURG. And V-PURG is strongly supportive of moving forward to in the general election mail every registered voter a ballot in the way that Bill has described and that the Secretary of State has proposed to the governor. There are a number of different organizations and businesses that have gotten on board with this idea we have sent to Gail and I believe she's shared with you an op-ed that I wrote earlier this week that has links to a lot of other information and articles more than 1,700 Vermonters have already signed onto a petition urging the state to move forward with a universal vote by mail system. No, don't use vote by mail. We're going to use vote by mail because that's what we want to do. So I'm sorry to disagree with you but right now we have 30% of Vermonters who in a typical general election either vote early or vote with an absentee ballot but that leaves more than 200,000 Vermonters who typically vote and show up to the polls. What we would like to do is reduce the number of people who are showing up at the polls on election day to encourage them to vote safely from home and that means voting by mail. Voting by mail has meaning to people now like it never has before and it has incredible public support. 72% of Americans now support voting by mail in this upcoming general election and if we did a poll in Vermont, my expectation is that the number would be even higher than that. So we do want people to use this opportunity to vote by mail instead of showing up at the polling place if they possibly can. It's important that we preserve in-person voting for those who need or want to do that but for the benefit of the clerks, the poll workers, many of whom are senior citizens and volunteers and for the voters themselves, we would like very much to reduce those numbers of people showing up at polling places on election day. We have the benefit now of not hindsight but foresight six months we have to prepare for this election. Imagine if the country had moved expeditiously to a plan and take action when we first learned of the COVID problem and virus but instead that didn't happen at the federal level and we are suffering in some respects the consequences of that inaction. There's no reason for this state to stumble into the November elections by waiting until after the August primary. Instead we can begin and move forward and act and communicate effectively by moving forward now in all the ways that we'll describe that I certainly won't repeat to you but I can't, I think that there are all sorts of reasons why it makes sense to move forward and honestly I can't think of any reason not to because in August, we are not going to know what the COVID situation is going to be in November. The governor won't know, you won't know, Anthony Fauci won't be able to tell you what COVID-19 looks like in November come August 29th. So you're not gonna know with certainty that we should or shouldn't move forward even at that time. So if there is no reason not to go forward let's make the decision now and have certainty and allow it to be as effective as possible. Thank you for the opportunity. I have lots more information but if you look at the op-ed that we sent there are lots of links there. The last thing I'll mention Madam Chair is that this is not a situation that creates more barriers to voting. If anything it makes it a bit easier for some people to vote. And in Colorado, one of the studies that is linked to in the op-ed is one just came out in the last week or 10 days and it shows that in Colorado they adopted this system of voting in 2013. This analysis suggests that their voting has gone up across the board by about 9% that they link to this system of voting making it easier for people to cast a bell. So if anything we're inviting more people to participate easily in the process of voting this year and to do so in a way that protects their health and the health of elections workers. Thank you and I agree with everything except the phrase vote by mail because I think that we can encourage people to vote by mail but if we call it vote by mail people and I've had conversations with people who assume that that's the only way they'll be able to vote, that there will not be polls. So we need to, however we phrase this messaging we need to make it clear that this is not doing away with your right to go to the polls. That's why- I agree Madam Chair that we, the coalition of growth and the letters that we sent to the Secretary of State and Governor said we want three things. One is to have the universal ballots sent out universally to register voters to serve the in-person voting. So I totally agree with you on that. And the third is just that the state must engage in a broad public education campaign and to work with many of the businesses and organizations not in a nonpartisan way obviously to just educate people about how this process works because it is different for potentially hundreds of thousands of voters in the state. Thanks to all be quiet and allow you to move forward. I appreciate the opportunity. Chris? Paul, I just wanted to check in. So I understand the chair's concern about any particular name we come up with that wasn't the default under the current system but you looked at other states and what is the default phrase? I mean, even if it's- Well, often now you see there's a distinction that oftentimes people are making between absentee balloting, which is of course what Vermont has had for many years and it has been worked well effectively without problems for tens of thousands of Vermonters. But we want wants to distinguish typically between absentee balloting where the burden is on the voter to request a ballot to be sent to them versus what it's often now referred to as universal vote by mail that the implication there is that all registered voters are receiving a ballot automatically. And is it Washington state that does all its voting by mail? There are now five states that use the vote by mail process principally. Several of them also have in-person voting available. Colorado is another one of those states, Oregon, Utah and Hawaii, I believe Will can correct me if I'm wrong. And thanks. And Colorado is one of those that has also adopted some of the other measures that Vermont has. So for instance, same day voter registration and that's one other way that they encourage people to continue to participate in the process. Vermont is in a relatively good position for the 45 states that have not yet adopted this system of voting. Few are in any better position than we are to move forward to do it for this general election because of all the other reforms that frankly you members of this committee have already in many cases dreamt up and moved forward and passed. And with a successful implementation from the Secretary of State's office, it puts us in a pretty good spot, far better than many other states. Right. I know that when I've talked with voters, I've trained myself in, I don't know, the last half dozen years to not to try never to use the word absentee ballot anymore, you're allowed to vote early because absentee has this connotation for a lot of folks of you need an excuse, a reason, permission, blah, blah, blah, as opposed to, no, you just have an option, show up at the town clerk's office or request it by mail, but go anytime a year choice up to 45 days early. Okay, thanks. So I think that, I mean, we have no action to take on this. We've already given the go ahead to the Secretary of State to do this. And I, my feeling is go ahead. My lame brain ideas were just that. And I would say the governor's letter said, go ahead, get prepared, do everything you need to do. And I think that's what you should do and assume that we're going to vote mail a ballot to everybody. And if, who knows what's going to happen in September, October, and then I would like to jump into the rest of the discussion here. But I see Anthony and Chris both have, and Allison, Anthony. Well, when I first started hearing about this, I thought, well, it's not so hard, we just assume we're going to do it by mail and we could pull the plug at the last minute if we don't side not to, but now from listening to Will, that doesn't seem practical thing to do. So the question I have now is when you say, go ahead and do it, my question is whether the bill we passed gives the governor the chance to override what we may want to do. So come August, we all say today, this is what we're going to do. We're going to do the vote by mail or whatever we call it. And then August comes and we still say, yeah, we're going to do whatever we, we're going to do the vote by mail or whatever we call it. Does the governor have the power to stop, jump up and say, no, I don't agree with this. And so you're not going to be able to do it because the bill said that he has to be in agreement. So that's the question I have is whether or not he could kibosh the idea at the last minute. And if so, then do we need to pass another bill that says that we're going to do what we're going to do without being interfered with by the governor? I suppose that he could, he could do that. I think that he would do that at his peril because I think that there are enough people in Vermont that support this idea that I don't think it would be very wise of him to do it. And he did say, I mean, we could also always pass something else, I guess, because he said, if the legislature decided to, to say this is what we're going to do, he wouldn't stand in. That's what he said at the press conference. So I don't know if Will and Chris, how do you feel? Do you feel that we need to do something? And then we'll jump to Chris Bray had a question and then Allison. Can we just, I'm sorry, but I just want to ask Betsy, if she agrees that the governor or things that governor could just say no at the last minute. Betsy? Hi, Betsy and Rass Legislative Council. Yes, I think the governor can say no. The language is that the Secretary of State is authorized in consultation and agreement with the governor to order or permit appropriate. And that was our take on it as well. And that's why there's uncertainty in this whole process and we like that. Yeah, I just wanted to be clear that we're all clear on that. Going into on. And just very quickly, Senator, if I may, I just want to thank Paul Burns for bringing the focus back to the public health and safety. And this is this process that putting a ballot under every registered voters knows in November is our recommendation for the best way to drive down attendance at the polling places in November. And so I just hope everybody stays focused on the health and safety aspect of this in addition to protecting a person's right to vote. And then as far as legislative action, we continue to work with the governor's office, even though they rejected our proposal last week, we're continuing to have conversations with them, correspond back and forth, ask additional questions, get additional questions answered, we hope. And so we don't think the time is right yet for any legislative action. We're not making that request at this point. Okay, that was my question. Chris? Honestly, I'm a little disappointed we're having to have this conversation at all because it seems entirely unnecessary given kind of, I don't know how to understand what the administration's position is when they say we don't want to be in the middle of it. So there's a way to not be in the middle of it. That is to say, I planned henceforth different entirely to the chief elections officer of the state of Vermont. Period, full stop, but we're not hearing that. We hear that there could be a choice later on and that brings uncertainty back into the whole thing in a system where everyone would like, not for political reasons, but just simply to protect the vote, which is so fundamental from any kind of problem. So as well as the public health and safety issues, which to me are always an overriding concern. So I don't know if we should ask to have legislation drafted so we could be ready to take prompt action. It seems to me is that we were almost invited to do so by the governor who said, if there were a bill, then I would be fine with that. If it's clarity for the administration that it's the legislature making this choice, then I'm feeling fully confident in the secretary of state's office to do this well. And I would love to make it their job easier and the messaging to Vermonters far more clear and direct. Like that we're not gonna have questions hanging over us all summer long about what the fall will look like. How will the pandemic be receding or growing? I'd say let's ditch all that and just be declarative and straightforward. So. I really appreciate that Senator Bray. And if I could, Madam Chair, just very quickly, we're struggling to understand exactly what the governor's objections are. He said he's not philosophically opposed to mailing a ballot to every voter, that he's not concerned about ballot fraud, that he doesn't wanna be in this position. He didn't wanna be in the position between the secretary of state's office and elections. And has said very publicly that he trusts and defers to our office as the experts in the conduct of elections. But he's still got a few remaining concerns that we're just trying to understand better and hope that we can address. And we hope that that can be done this week. And if not, I think it'll be time to start thinking about plan B. But as I said, at this point, we're not asking you to do anything, but of course you're prerogative to put things together and be prepared to do something if you think that's the right course of action. So Madam Chair, sorry, can I just finish based on that? If your game, I would hope the committee might consider preparing draft legislation just so that we could act expeditiously if we decided that was our course as opposed to making decision in two or three days and then having to ask Betsy Ann to scramble or something like that. Thank you. That's what I was gonna suggest, but let's go to Allison. Well, Chris and Anthony really summarized because I've had emails asking, I mean, we've all had emails. Thank you, Paul. Your beeper crowd has been very active. I thought it was fairly clear in his letter that he deferred to your expertise. He gave you the green light, but I'm concerned that if we do it legislatively, we have done it legislatively and we added that agreement bit with the governor, which I in some ways now regret, we should have left the expertise with the Secretary of State. So in some ways, but we did that also to get to unanimously move forward on this. I am concerned about the divisiveness. If we do it legislatively that it might be divisive. And I think we're all united on the objectives here. And on the other hand, I think we can't wait, it needs to happen. And so I'm sort of torn between not wanting to make this a wedge issue between Democrats and Republicans. I guess all united on our objectives here. So those are sort of my concerns. Otherwise I would say let's do legislation tomorrow because that was our intent. So I am not sure that this is a Vermont partisan issue because I think that the governor is not, I may be wrong here, but I don't think he sees this necessarily as a partisan issue that he's not worried about the same thing that the National Republican Party is concerned with. He's not saying those same things. I agree. I just think within the legislature it creates an opportunity. It does, but I would hope that the governor as the, if not the actual leader of the Republican Party in Vermont, the titular leader would be able to indicate to people that this is not necessarily a partisan issue. And that I think his concerns are, he really just wants it to be back to normal and he wants elections. So I don't think he thinks of this as a partisan issue. I might be wrong, but Chris. So yeah, I think one of the ways we most go off the rails as legislators is to speculate on motivation for anything. So I want to leave that out entirely and just say, you know, I picked the governor at his word. He said, basically we have an invitation to pass legislation that clarifies this. I don't see any reason to look, and under the hood, I don't see anything we can look in our democratic about it. I just see our chief officer saying, I invite the legislature to legislate on this if they think it will bring more clarity of the situation. And like, you know, again, for me, it's just, we don't need to worry. I don't see it as a wedge issue. There's an invitation to legislate our intent. We've already articulated what's clear at the outset. We were just trying to be, I think, cordial. And now if that has created some room for confusion, let's take the offer and face value and move a bill that eliminates the confusion. Well, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just feel the need to again weigh in and say that I do oppose the plan going forward. And since we last talked about this, I've heard from two of the clerks in my county, including the city clerk of the largest municipality, who is very, very opposed to this and said that he would reach out to Will. I don't know whether he has yet or not. So I just, I still have concerns of, as much as I enjoy working with both Will and Chris from the secretary's office on 99% of what else we do, this is one issue where I just, I'm not on board. So Will have clerks reached out to you in opposition. And if so, what is their opposition? It truly is a mixed bag. I hear from clerks who strongly support the idea and those who don't. For me personally, the personal contacts to me have been more on the support side, but I really don't want to assert how many are out there. I have not talked to all of them or nearly all of them. I will tell you that I've talked to a lot of the ones from the bigger cities who have expressed their support for this in general. One that I was really pleased by was when the Bennington Town Clerk recently followed up with me and said that she supported our plan in general when she had had a lot of opposition to even giving us the authority in the first place. And Senator Cullmer, I know Henry well and would be happy to talk to him. And it has been my experience that a lot of, that the clerks who oppose the idea initially are more comfortable with it once they have a chance for me to explain how we are going to do it. For instance, I would hope that he's entirely clear that we're only sending to active voters. That's a major concern among the clerks is also sending to the inactive challenge voters on their list and we've taken that off the table. And also that he understands that we're offering to perform it from a central location and wouldn't be asking him and his poll workers to manage the mailing process. But some people are just opposed to the idea in general too and I'd be happy to talk to Henry. Thank you. Chris, did you have another comment? You asked the question. I just didn't, of course I'd love to hear what concerns are emerging from town clerks who have a ground level view of election day proceedings. Then again, we're legislating for the whole state. There's not a second plenary body of town clerks who are designing our elections. So I think we can create clarity for everyone. So what I would suggest perhaps is Betsy, if you could just in anticipation and at the governor's invitation draft something up for us that we could look at in case we feel we should do it. But I would follow the secretary of state's office and not do anything until they feel the time is appropriate. Can you- Are we back to the plane going down the runway, madam chair? I think we're about to crash. Because I think that we have been, we're off the runway and we're still on the ground. But does that make sense committee to have just an, I guess working with Will to figure out the best way of saying this in a, and it is as Chris pointed out at the governor's invitation that we would be even considering this. You know, in respect for Senator Calamor's concerns, maybe, I don't know if Will, if you could not right now off the top of your head, but maybe for a future meeting of this committee, just enumerate some of the concerns you've heard and how the program you're designing addresses those concerns. Maybe you've been able to resolve them all, maybe not all of them, but it would just be, I wanna respect, you know, that again, the town clerk experience on the ground doing elections firsthand. So it'd be helpful to me as a member of this committee to hear what you've been hearing and how you may have been able to address them. I'd be happy to Senator Bray. I just gave you a couple of examples. One other that comes right off the top of my head is what I spoke about actually at the beginning that I was working on with our programmers, the ability to enter in all of the requests and issuance of these ballots to them in the election management system centrally. A lot of the clerks are still worried that they're gonna be asked to go in and enter these requested issue dates for all of their voters. Thank you. I think, and I think my general message, I've tried to give a general message to them. I communicate with them all as a group fairly regularly once every week or so. And my general message has been, I'm not just gonna say that you're sending ballots to all of your voters and leave you out to figure it out. That we are here and thinking about designing the system in the way that will make it easiest for them and reduce their exposure, which again is everybody's goal. So thanks. Can I ask one quick follow up? Yeah, sorry. I'm making up for all those months where I had no questions. Is there amongst town clerks since there are so many, is there sort of an election subgroup that helps gather the opinion of town clerks distill it down and that you can work with them? Otherwise it does seem a little unwieldy to ask you to check in with 246 towns that are all voting. Yeah, I appreciate that. And it's not an election specific subgroup, but the subgroup that we have been communicating with and have reached out to about this is the legislative committee of the Vermont Clerks and Treasures Association, the VMCPA. Thanks. So I think that in coming up with some sort of potential legislation that in there, I would make it very clear that this is not requiring people to mail in their ballots. I still think that is important because I think that there are people who when they read vote by mail, they assume that there's not gonna be any other option. And I think that if we do anything that whether it's a bill or a legislative resolution or whatever that it needs to be clear that this is a mailing out. It's a mailing out to everybody. It's an option for how you return them. And in the education program is likely to happen, it can be stressed that there are different ways of voting here. It is not just voting by mail. And I think that that's, I know when we talked in committee before when we talked about it in, I think it was Oregon, does Oregon do it? And my understanding was that their only option was to mail in their ballots. That they did not have polling places where they could go. And so I think that if I misunderstood that, then there are certainly a lot of people out there who aren't as immersed in it as we are that misunderstand that also. So I think that in anything we do, we need to make it very clear that it is not a requirement to send in your ballot. Does that make sense? Sure. You're emphasizing that it's ballots delivered by mail. Right. Yes. That's exactly what she is. We are mailing a ballot to everyone. How you choose to return that ballot is your choice. If you want to mail it back, if you want to drop it in a safe deposit box that the town clerk might do, if you want to take it down to the town clerk's office or if you want to appear at the poll, it's entirely up to you. It's your decision, the voter's decision. And that I think is misunderstood by a lot of people. So, all right Betsy, are we all set? We haven't done anything about transition or lessons learned on elections. Well, we're learning something about the bill we passed. Yeah. Yes. I think the lesson learned here is that we should have stuck to our initial guns, which was keeping the power and the choice with the secretary of state and not adding that agreement with the governor. I know it was a concession and I understand that and I appreciate it at the time, but I think had we known that this would have created this, I would have kept it all with the secretary of state. And I honestly think that governor probably would have been happier about that too. Yeah, I agree. Am I remembering correct, oops, am I remembering correctly that the governor did not ask for that phrase? No, I don't know where it originated, but. It originated with host members. Yeah. Okay, so do we know where we're going with this? Well, Betsy will draft something up, some potential language for us. We won't do anything until Chris or we'll get back to us. We will, Chris will talk with the town clerks who are, Will will talk to the town clerks who are still reluctant and find out what their issues are and maybe their issues will go away. Maybe they won't. If it's a philosophical issue, they probably won't go away, but if it's a procedural issue, they might go away and then we'll come back to this, Allison. My concern is Will's deadline at the end of May and are getting legislation passed by that time. Oh, so I would say that we have a drop dead date of that because we have to get it passed by the Senate. That's going to the house. It's going to take a few days. It's going to take a week plus. So I would think we would have to make that decision at our meeting on Friday afternoon. Well, or call a special meeting Monday to ask to be on the Senate calendar on Tuesday morning. Right, right. That's what I was thinking that we are meeting on Friday and we'll talk to Chris and Will again on Friday to see where we are. And we can again, individually try to encourage the governor to, Chris. I don't want to belabor this, but I'm just thinking we just talked about the how we refer to this. So maybe in what Betsy and his drafting we could refer to delivery of ballots by mail, which seems quite concrete straightforward. And it doesn't talk about the voting piece at all. I mean, that'll get in there eventually. Right. Delivery of ballots by mail. Thank you. Betsy. Hello. I have to get going to house go-ups. I think you're, are you done with elections at two? I think so. Okay. And I'll just work with the director of elections if that's so we can get the language to what would work administratively for the secretary of state's office on this language. Sound good? Okay. Sounds good. Sounds good. Okay. Thank you. I'll have to get going to house go-ups, but Will I'll be in touch with you. Okay. Great. All right. Quick for it. Thank you. Thank you, Betsy Ann. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Well, lessons learned. Be careful what you ask for. Or be careful when someone asks you something. So where are we? With, I, I'm not sure. Not sure we're clear on it yet. Well, we're not clear on that. I, we have Peter Elwell with us. Peter Elwell with us. And I don't know if we have Tucker. We do not. Dale. I'm just gonna drop off. I just wanna thank you for the opportunity. Thank you, Paul. Same here. Thank you very much, everybody. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not gonna dream about elections anymore. So don't worry. We hope not. You'll be dreaming about elections through November. Probably every day. Gail, did you? Yeah. The adjutant general will be joining us shortly. Okay. So maybe what we'll do is we'll jump since we have both Karen Horn and Peter Elwell here right now, we'll jump to 947 that was given to us this morning. Oh, and there's Damien. Damien, are you the author of that? No, that would be Tucker. Oh, that would be Tucker. Okay. Oh, Damien, you're here for military? Yeah. Okay. So Karen and Peter, until Greg Knight joins us, do you wanna tell us what 947 is and it was sent to us today? Do we have a copy of it? It is on your website, Madam Chair. Okay. Okay. Under Tucker Anderson. Got it. Yep, got it. Okay. Do you wanna tell us what it is? I think I understand it, but just explain it to us and why it's important to do now. The bill would provide for a municipality to adopt a municipal budget and a tax rate if they have not yet had an annual meeting for the purposes of adopting the budget. And there are only a couple of towns, Brattleboro being one that has not yet had its town meeting because it's a representative town meeting and Peter can speak to that. And the other town is Barrie Town. They have actually scheduled a town meeting for June 1 and we'll see what happens with that, how they address that. I'm not sure of the details of how they're gonna hold that election. There are also a few villages and I'm afraid I don't have the list of villages here that have not yet had their votes, their annual meeting votes. So that's really what it would allow the municipality to do, adopt a budget and a tax rate until they're in a position where they can have a actual town vote. Okay. You may wanna go next. Okay, Peter. Thank you, Senator. Yeah, so in Brattleboro, we have representative town meeting and the way that works is on town meeting day when all the other towns are holding town meetings, we have an election where 140 residents of the town who have run for town meeting representative as an elected office, get elected. And then our town meeting is held three weeks later on a Saturday. Usually for all day, the way the structure works and the active participation of our citizens here in Brattleboro, we've got a long tradition of that nine o'clock meeting going at least until tier three in the afternoon. Last year it went until about 9.30 at night. It's not uncommon that it goes until about six or seven. So we have full warnings and long discussions and lots of parliamentary action that goes on. Amendments and multiple votes to cease debate. A lot of times there'll be a motion to cease debate and then it fails and there's another one a little while later. So I say all that just to give you a little flavor for the challenge of trying to hold such a meeting with 140 voting representatives in this format, whether that be Zoom or go to meeting or whichever. So we're really concerned about that. We don't think that's a, we think that's bad for the democratic process to try to hold a meeting of that larger group of people that much active participation in this format. And we want to preserve the ability, hopefully as the summer goes along, to with proper spacing in a proper setting, possibly even outdoors, hold the representative town meeting for 2020. Because of the timing, if you remember back to March as this unfolded with COVID-19, the towns that held town meeting on town meeting day were able to do that. But by the time March 21st came around, which was when our representative town meeting had been warned for on its usual Saturday, three weeks later, we weren't able to safely and legally have 140 representatives in another 30 or so people in a room. So the work around, there was some initial discussion of having this in the bill that you already have all passed both in the Senate and the House, I believe signed by the governor now, that provides broader flexibility regarding tax deadlines and tax penalties and interest that municipalities can exercise on a case by case basis for what is fitting for their community. We appreciate that. But in our particular situation, we also need the ability to have an adopted budget and an approved tax rate by July 1st in order to ensure a continuity of government into the new fiscal year. And so what H947 does as approved by the House, and we hope soon to be approved by you in the Senate, will allow the select board this year only during the COVID-19 situation to adopt the budget and approve the tax rate so that we can continue into the fiscal year without running out of money and having to borrow. And then when we're able to hold a representative town meeting, which we hope to do in possibly as soon as July, but certainly somewhere between July and September before the predicted return and new surge of cases that may come upon us all in the fall, then we would hold the representative town meeting and address the larger body of business. And the legislation isn't explicitly clear on this, but I can tell you that the political moors in Brattleboro are such that the select board will put its adopted budget back before representative town meeting to make sure it either gets ratified or modified. That's not, like I said, explicit in the legislation which allows the select board to adopt a budget, but I'm certain that that's the way it would proceed here because I don't think representative town meeting will have it any other way. If you didn't put it before them, they would bring it up anyway. Well, they wouldn't be able to bring it up for action, but there would be consequences. There would be political consequences to having a select board adopt the budget and then not warn that same budget when it could for ratifying action by the town meeting. One other quick thing, if I might, I know you've got folks waiting, but just if it gives you any greater comfort in terms of the unusual circumstances here, the last two years in a row, our representative town meeting has actually increased the budget that the select board sent to them before adopting it. So I'm personally not concerned. I know that you have to take that at face value, but I'm personally not concerned that this will sort of interfere with the taxpayer's ability to control unwanted increases. I think there's gonna be a healthy discussion at the select board level before that budget is adopted. And then again, in the ratification process at representative town meeting about the particular circumstances this year, but the general atmosphere at representative town meeting in the last few years has actually been more interested in raising revenue and increasing service than in cutting taxes. So committee, any questions about this or concerns, Brian? Thank you, Madam Chair. Peter or whichever person drafted it, what was the vote in the house? Was it just a voice vote? Was there any opposition? There, you mean on the house floor, Senator? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was not any opposition on the house floor that I recall. I'm gonna go back and double-check that. But there may have been a couple of questions, but there wasn't any opposition. Okay. Thank you. And it was unanimous that house gov ops also. Thank you, Peter. Well, with that said, since in essence, we've already passed S344, which by the way, to my knowledge, still has not been signed into law by the governor, and does give in essence the same flexibility. In other words, if you had had your town meeting earlier, Peter, before the declared state of emergency, you would have already been included in the bill that we already passed. So I don't see that this changes the landscape one bit. And I would move that we voted out today. Allison? Wow, she's speechless. Allison, do you want to weigh in? I'd like to, yes, I'm happy to support this. I think it's important that we get these budgets approved and move forward. But the, it was Brattleboro and Barry and what other jurisdictions? A couple villages, she said. We'll get the names of... Yeah, okay. So it's more than just two. It's a smacks. It could apply to a few villages as well. We'll make sure we know exactly who they are before we record it on the floor. What stock is one of them? Okay, Anthony? I think it's fine. I think we should do it. Okay, Chris? Yes, I'm good. Thanks. Are you good? All right. Does somebody want to make a motion? I think Brian did. I will move that. The committee voted out H937 favorably with no amendments. All right. Clerk, do you want to call the roll? Absolutely, it is my pleasure. Senator Bray. Yes. Senator Clarkson. Yes, Senator Collamore. Yes. Senator Polina. Yes. Senator White. Yes. Great. Senator Collamore, would you like to report this? You're our usual charter reporter? I'd be glad to, Madam Chair. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, so I will bring this to the rules committee and see if we can get it on the floor on Thursday. And Karen or whoever has the information on which other municipalities would be impacted by this, that would be helpful if you could let me know. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. We won't be voting on it until perhaps Thursday. I'm hoping that we could do it on Thursday. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much. Thank you, Karen. And I see you're not in your car today. I'm not in my car. No. Slow down. Actually, I want to ask Karen a question to Senator Carrs. Karen, I don't know if you know more about this than I do or not, but before we talk, we were talking about elections. I think the town of Barry has chosen to mail out ballots and have people return them in their cars. It's like you drive through balloting. Does you know anything about that? That may be, I can find out for you. I'm not sure what they had decided to do, but I can find out. Well, I was just curious. Well, sure, you can find out. That'd be great. I was just curious, because they talked about it as drives through voting. Oh, okay. They would mail a ballot to everybody, but they could return it by driving through some kind of space where they could drop their ballots or they could just fill out a ballot there. Let's stay in their car. Yeah, there are. That was interesting. Right. There are a few towns that have looked at that for different kinds of, well, there's a few school budgets that they didn't have their meetings yet. So, and at least one of them, Melton looked at drive-through voting. So I will find out. All right, thanks. I was just curious. Thank you. Okay. And Tucker, thank you for joining us. We've just passed the bill. I did see Tucker there somewhere. Okay. Shall we move on to what we've learned in terms of the military? And this really probably isn't a long conversation, but we thought that we should address it since the military is in our jurisdiction. And I see the adjutant general has joined us. Am I right? I think you're there. How are you, ma'am? Good. Good, you are here with us. Thank you so much. Connection is not the best, but we'll make do. Okay. So what we're kind of looking at here is three different questions. And I think they all got sent to you, but how we move from this crisis mode to something that is more normal. How we, if there are any things that we need to do now so that we're better prepared when this, if and when this hits again, so that we're not scrambling then, we are prepared for it, better prepared. And what things have we learned that are, that we addressed in a crisis that could then become permanent changes in better ways of doing things? So if you would like to just talk to us about the kind of those issues around the National Guard and how we deployed them and how what we might have learned that we should do better and if there's anything that we need to do about it. So take it away. Does that committee, do any of you have anything to add to that before we turn it over to the adjutant general? No. No. Okay. All right, so please. Well, thank you, ma'am. So I can tell you probably from the very beginning we have these things we call warning orders and Vermont was big picture probably better off than most at the very beginning of this and has remained so. So I think having a very pragmatic and in some instances aggressive approach early on has been very beneficial. But for us, that warning order it's kind of a predictor of the direction of things. And very at the very beginning we had our medical planners and some of our senior staff officers including our directive military support embedded within the state EOC and with the Health Operations Center kind of as a liaison. And that information through all their meetings was fed very efficiently back to us. So we were pretty well prepared and postured to get folks in the right status at the right time. Now, concurrent with that of course is the transition and this is not a problem for Senate GOV ops. It's more my problem working with the governor's office and our US purchasing at fiscal office. And that's getting us transitioned from state active duty into title 32 under sections 502 F and all that does along in short of it is it takes us off of state money and state funding and gets us on to federal funding. And that comes with a mission assignment from FEMA. So long as those soldiers and airmen are on orders that align with those mission assignments assigned by FEMA then we would receive federal funding. And we've been very good at getting that done and had a very quick turnaround with the state EOC with Director Borneman working with the governor's office to get that to the White House through DOD for approval. But are there things we can do better? I'm sure there are, but from my perspective it's been about as seamless as we could make it. And I could walk you through some of the things the guard's been doing at the direction and request of the governor if that's of interest to you. Sure, committee. Okay, sure. So one of the first undertakings we did we established a triage site in conjunction with the University of Vermont Medical Center and that was our Charlie company, our medical company from the Brigade Support Battalion. And over the matter of probably three days very quickly had a site established up there preparing for what we didn't know what but the potential of a surge. And then shortly following that our air guard civil engineers and in conjunction with our 40th Army Band built the Essex alternate care location that the 400 bed alternate care location. And that was inclusive of water and power and those 400 beds. And then they took it even further and built an isolation pod of 50 beds within six days. And then on the seventh day the mission changed to the potential of having COVID positive patients. And then within literally a matter of hours they had converted that 50 bed isolation pod into a negative pressure area. So you could keep COVID positive patients there for treatment. Now what's important here is I shared what we did what those civil engineers did in conjunction with our band in building that and the cost. And overall it was about $230,000 to get it built and up and running and that's inclusive of power and electricity. That became in essence the best practice. I briefed it on a teleconference with the chief of National Guard Bureau and the 54 sent the plans to some of our sister state adjutants general. And then they in turn I probably went through National Guard Bureau went to all the state FEMA reps because that the cost and efficiency with which our folks built that in my view was unprecedented. So it was great work. It's a little bit of Yankee ingenuity perhaps but it was very well received and we're paying it forward to the rest of the United States. In the past three weeks we've distributed over 520,000 FEMA meals ready to eat throughout Vermont. And that again is the brigade support battalion that's our transportation soldiers doing that. The Air National Guard is still managing the SNS warehouse in Colchester. We've got five personnel assisting with plans. And again, that's inclusive of our director of military support working with the state EOC and director Boardman and her team. And we've also got five teams available if the request comes to assist with testing. But that's where we are right now, ma'am. So can you just tell us how many meals again how many meals ready to eat you distributed? About 520,000. Wow. So of the people who have been doing the building and all the other things do we have any sense of how many of them had perhaps lost their civilian jobs that so they were ready to be called? I mean, didn't we end up taking people away from other essential jobs to put them there? Or were many of these people in a position where they were not essential workers and could fill the need? The only one that I know of that was taken at least for a brief period was a first responder. And we spoke to that soldier and he was actually sent back to the rescue squad that he worked for. So that was very quickly resolved. So we didn't have any further issues in that. A number of folks that we have on orders were full-timers. I don't have the percentages off the top of my head. But I don't know of anybody that was without work or unemployed because of this crisis. That there certainly may be some. Because I was thinking that if people had lost their other jobs, this was great for them to then be able to hopefully be paid through FEMA somehow for this work. Right, that would take a little bit of research but we could probably find that out if that's something you're interested in, ma'am. You know, if it's easy to do but there are a lot of things you have to do. So I'm not sure that it's worth a lot of effort. Okay. Any other questions or concerns or Allison? Greg, did you have a pandemic plan in place or the National Guard nationally? Well, we have a, it was every day but now we're doing it three times a week. Every state is different. Every state's been affected obviously and impacted differently. For us, we very quickly, in fact, before it became policy within the state, established alternate work schedules and what we were calling virtual drills. There's always something to do and not everything we do has to take place at an armory or at the wing. So for instance, the wing got ahead of it and started doing a rotating work schedule, maintaining the social distancing and sanitizing very early on in this. And we've been very fortunate. We've only had a handful of folks that have been affected and obviously in the forefront of all this is making sure we preserve the readiness of the force. So that was the driving reason to get ahead of this and make those decisions early. Right. I guess I meant, I mean, did you have a pandemic specific plan in place before this even hit? I mean, did you- Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry, I misunderstood the question. Yes, that's the Vermont All Hazards Plan. And although we haven't specifically rehearsed this particular pandemic type scenario, a lot of the other tabletop exercises we do, for instance, with Vigilant Guard still provides us a good rehearsal for something like this. And so having that plan in place helped you roll it out as you said seamlessly? Yes, ma'am. Certainly there were a few staff hiccups, but that was until we, it wasn't very long. We got our feet under us and everybody knows everybody. And that's the benefit of doing what we do. Keep habitual relationships with the governor's office. I communicate with them very regularly. Colonel Gates is down with SEOC and Mike Smith and Mike Shirling. So it's been really good. And that's probably central, I think, to our success in executing whatever has been asked of us is the effective communication. And just to finish up on that, how often do you update that All Hazards Plan? I would have to check, ma'am. I'm not sure the last time it was updated. Thanks, if you'd let us know that would be great. Yeah, I believe, yeah, I'm talking to my director, the joint staff. It was probably last summer, but I can confirm that with Colonel Gates. Great, it'd be great to know. That isn't just a guard All Hazards Plan. This involves, I think, the emergency management directors and stuff from the towns and from the regional planning commissions and stuff. Am I right? Yes, ma'am. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. I thought it was specific to the National Guard. No, it is a Vermont All Hazards Plan that involves local emergency management directors and regional planning people. And it is a pretty comprehensive plan. And the manual, if you want to look at it, is about this thick. Right, right. And who oversees that, Jeanette? Of Vermont Emergency Management. So, Erica. Erica, right, okay. I believe I'm right on that, right? I was bad, though. I think I heard a yes. Right. Yes, ma'am, that's correct. Yeah. Right, yeah. It would be great at some point to hear about how often it's reviewed and how effective it was and all that stuff. Well, I know that there were some pretty, I'm pretty sure there were some pretty major drills down here last summer. I mean, some test drills and stuff. Right? Yes, ma'am. And we do those routinely. The big one, obviously for us, is the Vigilant Guard exercises. And those are actually done in all of the Guard States, different tabletop exercises with their emergency management teams. Any more questions for the adjutant general? Anthony. I have a very basic question. General, when you talk about building the 400 bed site and whatnot, I'm presuming that's all, there were 400 beds were shipped up using federal dollars from elsewhere. All state dollars. State dollars, okay. Because I was just curious, because we heard all these problems with equipment not being lacking. And so you didn't have a problem with that when it came time to build something? I'm glad to see the resources were there to make that happen. No, so the resources were available. We understood the urgency and work with, you know, Mr. Gregg, the deputy adjutant general who was really central to the success of getting things funded and work with BGS. And I'll tell you, hats off to those folks. It's just a remarkable job, streamlining the contracting process, getting what normally is a very detailed and task intensive thing that takes weeks sometimes, if not longer, and literally in some instances got it down to a matter of hours. So they just did a remarkable job. And in the end, it'll be FEMA reimbursable. I'm not sure the percentages. It might be a hundred percent, I can confirm that. So this sounds like a silly question, but we had 400 beds lying around somewhere. Some of those beds were out of existing guard inventory and then a number of them came from the Strategic National Stockpile, the actual hospital beds that were designed to have an IV bag and all that stuff on it. Interesting. Thanks a lot for all you've done. Appreciate it. Yes, sir. So any other questions or Chris? Yeah. I have a quick question on what's the fate of that special hospital, I guess we call it, over at the fairgrounds? Are you, is it gonna stay ready because we don't really know what the future holds or what's next for that? Well, right now we've finished up the plan and we're gonna start breaking it down and retain a 50 bed surge capacity, 25 COVID positive, 25 non-COVID patients and the structure itself, the framing and all the walls and all of the outlets and all of that stuff. We've worked out a plan to actually store that here at Camp Johnson in its design. It's all four by eight construction, so it's very modular. So all the parts will be labeled and will be stored in a somewhat humidity controlled warehouse here at Camp Johnson. So we'll be ready. We'll already have the walls built so we won't have to start from scratch, but if we get indications that there's gonna be a surge, we'll be able to stand it up pretty quickly. Right, but I mean, so you're saying it gets pared back down, is there anything gonna, I don't know, a month from now, will there still be anything at the fairgrounds or will it be all in storage? Well, we anticipate that that facility, at least the 50 beds will be there through the end of June. Okay. And of course, it'll be an iterative evaluation process, we'll have to keep looking at this with Dr. Levine, you know, the Department of Health and the Governor's Office. And if we've got indicators that, you know, there's gonna be a spike down the road late summer or fall, then we'll be prepared to stand it back up again. And you was your team also, right, that set up the facility at UVM? Yes, sir, that's correct. And is UVM gonna be mothballed or is UVM gonna sort of being ready, just waiting? That's a Department of Health decision. I believe we've already pulled our folks out and are starting to break down that particular triage site. But again, that's a pretty quick turn for us. That was pretty straightforward. That's what those folks do. They establish those type of forward facilities. Okay. Well, I think it was very reassuring for a lot of people to see how quickly you were able to put all that kind of resource together. Thankfully, we didn't need it really, but I think it was at a time when things were really kind of stunning for everyone. It was great to see that high level of function on your team. So thank you. Yeah, here, here. Absolutely. So we're happy to be a part of it. And then you're correct. I think all of us feel the same way that we're very happy that we haven't needed it. And hopefully it will stay that way. So I think our trend will continue. That's what we're all hoping for. And your preparation for this or your response to this actually puts us in a much better position for any other, not only this pandemic, but any other kind of crisis that I know that after when we had all the training down here around Vermont Yankee and the Red Cross responded and we had more mobile Red Cross units and stuff we were better prepared to deal with Irene than we would have been otherwise. So we, unfortunately, we each crisis puts us in a better position for the next one. That's unfortunate, but that is the way it is. Yes, ma'am. And you had mentioned the Red Cross, and I would be remiss to not bring it up. That's something else that our soldiers did. I believe we did six blood drives because as this thing started to develop, the Red Cross had numerous cancellations on the sites for their blood drives and our folks stepped up and opened the armories. And again, Mr. Greg did a great job facilitating that. So in each instance, the Red Cross showed up with their volunteers and they ran out of bags. The level of donation was so high. So we're looking at, we get on the backside of eight weeks and we'll do it again. Thank you. Any more questions? All set. All right, well, we just, we really want to thank you both for being here today, but for also for all that you did and your fast response and keeping people assured that you are out there working for us. So I think that that's, we really need, we owe you a debt of gratitude, so. Thank you. It's an honor for us to do it, ma'am. I appreciate what you do for us. So please pass that on from us to your members. Here, here. I will do that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your time today, ma'am. Absolutely, stay safe. Yes, you too. Thank you. All right, committee, we're going to, I see we have Representative Harrison here with us. Hello. So would you like to talk to us about anything in particular or should we just start questioning you? Or would you like to talk about the Wattersfield Charter? First of all, I'm having a little internet problem today. So if you can't hear me, okay, let me know and I'll call back. We will. Okay. So I just an update on charters. We passed one or we're earlier in the session to you Perkinsville. It's pretty straightforward. The town of Wattersfield includes the village of Perkinsville and that's bill H554. Ann Marie Christensen, Representative Christensen can certainly give you the background. She happens to be president of the board of trustees for the village of Perkinsville. And they were formed some many, many years ago to basically pay the light bill for the little section in the village. It's getting harder and harder to get everyone together. So they approach the select board because they're in part of the town of Wattersfield and asked if they were to dissolve, would that be okay with the select board? So the select board said yes, they reached an agreement. They had a little bit of money and I accent little which the village wanted to give to the old school that is being preserved in the village. And they wanted an agreement to continue the lights and that little section would be continued to be paid for. The select board agreed to that and this merger or disillusion of the village of Perkinsville basically puts that all in and it's been agreed to by all parties, the select board unanimously as well as the voters in the village itself. Believe it passed the House unanimous. I know it passed the our committee unanimously. So it's pretty straightforward and happy to answer any questions on that. Beyond that, if you have just a minute I'll just update you on some other questions. Let's see first if there are any questions on that one. Allison. So Jim, it's good to see you. My understanding from Anne Marie because I spoke with her in preparation for this discussion. There are only 72 residents in the village of Perkinsville. And my understanding is that either it's Perkinsville that has the charter not the town of Weathersfield, is that right? That's correct. If Perkinsville dissolves, I mean, there are all members of the town anyhow. So the village is within the town. Right, but it's the village that had the charter not the town. That's correct, that's correct. Which is unusual. I mentioned it only because that's unusual. And what was also unusual about this is that this is about the street lights. The street lights were actually evidently put in and owned by a legislator initially. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, and yeah. Anyway, which is pretty interesting. Thanks. What I didn't ask is pre-1965 if they were able to have a legislator for both the village and the town. But I didn't dig that up. I believe they only got town because all of us only got town. Those still have villages. But my understanding is this is a matter of $3,000. It's pretty modest. And so the town was happy to absorb it. Right. All right, so do we want to vote on this charter? Well, actually, I'm not sure we can, we weren't given permission to actually vote today. So we'll hold off and vote on Friday unless there's any concerns. None here. Okay, so Jim, do you want to, did you have other things, other charters that you wanted to talk to us about? Sure. So there is one charter that's been on the house calendar since before we left the house chamber back in March has to do with the Brattleboro Charter H535 that allows 16 year olds to vote on local elections. That was deemed a little controversial. I don't know what status of that is going forward, but it is on the house calendar. It has been since March 13th. In our committee, we had half a dozen or five, five or six new charters since town meeting that have been introduced over the past couple of weeks. Some of them in all likelihood, we're not going to get to because they're going to require a fair amount of testimony. They have provisions that are a little bit out of the ordinary. For example, one has a provision in there that allows them to pick and choose any town charter provision that's been passed or authorized in any other town. So would require a lot of testimony and understanding of what some of the towns want to do. And our chair has indicated we might have the time we're banned with to take a lot of testimony. There are two that local option taxes. And all likelihood because that's pretty simple. It's just enabling. We will probably advance those. They will have to go to the Ways and Means Committee. One is H946 Elmore, which wants a local rooms tax. I assume for Airbnb's because the last I looked, they don't have any hotels in that town. And the other is H943. St. Albans would like to have the ability to do a local option tax. So those two, I think are pretty straightforward. We don't need to do much testimony. And I suspect we'll move them on. And those decisions will be made by Ways and Means. But whether they make it through in time still remains to be seen. But those are too likely to be coming up. We have one for Essex, which we talked about before. That would require quite a bit of testimony. That's H944. I'm not sure if there's a will to devote a lot of time to that. There are different people in town that have indicated they would like to testify. The legislators representing Essex and Essex Junction have varied opinions. So, and again, they're hoping to put together a plan for merger in November. So it begs the question, what's the rush? If you're gonna change it in November, anyhow. Williston has several unique suggestions. Again, a lot of testimony. So I'm not sure we're gonna get there. They have a provision on labor relations law that's evidently different than any other municipal labor relations law. So again, that would take quite a bit of testimony to understand that provision. So it may not make it. And then the last one is Burlington H942. We just received that about yesterday or whenever we last night, I guess we received that. We have not taken any testimony on that one. I don't, I think it's pretty straightforward, but again, it's just a matter of time to deal with it. So I think that's all out in the pipeline. We had one earlier in the session, Fairhaven H678. It was a local auction tax. However, the voters voted it down at town meeting. Fairhaven submitted a charter request before they bothered to ask the voters to actually adopt the charter. We were going to wait and see how the voters turned it down. So we have not done anything with that bill. So that's, I think that's all we have that I can see so far unless Parker knows of something else. No. So any questions for Representative Harrison? No. Well, but not, I mean about charters. Just yes. So I think that what we'll do is, I think there's no issue with the Weathersfield Perkinsville Charter and we'll just wait and see if these other ones actually get to us or not. And so the way we're going to be doing non COVID related bills is that we will be, they will take the same process that they usually take. So there won't be, we won't be advancing them into all stages of passage like we are the COVID bills. We heard that this morning on the floor. So people should know that if a charter, if this charter comes up for a floor vote, it'll come up and then it'll follow the regular procedure. So any other questions? Well, thank you very much. Any other? Thank you. Thank you. All right. I'll go down and join my house colleagues. All right. Okay. Oh, are you on the floor? No, in committee. No, we're in a house of ops committee. We're doing, we're looking at the nurse compact. Oh, good. Okay. Well, thank you for joining us. Enjoy having Betsy. Oh, that's right. She said she was going there. Okay. So, any other questions or anything? Brian, you're going to get out of here by three. Yeah, that's great. In fact, you're going to get out a little bit, huh? I would like Allison actually to report that last charter because I think it's in your district and you seem to have so much interest in it. I'd be happy to. Once we get to vote it. I'm sure we will. My job, my job between now and then is finding out which legislator owned and then tried to increase the rates on the street lights. Yeah, that's really fascinating. That's unique. I know. Amazing. And you should tell that story on the floor. As long as you don't make fun of me. I don't. We will. Not yet. Not yet. Exactly. Okay. Anything else committee that we need to do today? We're going to look at law enforcement issues on Friday. And what I'm going to do is actually at the chair at the rules committee this morning, we're going to have permission to get 233 and 220 out of finance. And I'm going to have Betsy walk us through 124 of what's left. She did that nice piece for us on law enforcement and she'll send it out again because there are some things in there around the training council and the academy and stuff that I think we want to want to promote. And so we'll. If it's in appropriations now and the way they'll do it, I think is to have an amendment to pull out the parts that we've already passed in the initial bill that we did around EMS so that it doesn't get confusing. And then, so those are the, that's what we're going to do on Friday. Any other? Yeah, I just wanted to bring up the, so Brian and I were on the lessons learned call and Anthony was on it because of transitions. Oh no, it was just Brian and me this morning. We had a lessons learned. And our objective is to try and get all the lessons learned if we can just the high level lessons learned from each committee by the end of this week. And we're asking committees, we're going to your suggestion to that and asking each committee to do the first dive on it, but fairly high level at this point before we get into the possible changes but those sort of high level initial lessons learned while they're fresh in our mind is the whole point. So is this lessons learned? So, because I think of this as three things, not two. The first is how do we transition to a non-crisis mode? The second is what did we learn that we need to be, make sure is in position for the next, when the next wave hits or if it does so that we're not scrambling again. And then the third is what did we learn that can become permanent? So I'm not sure which lessons learned you guys are dealing with. I think all, we're not dealing with the transitions. That's right. No, no, no, but which lessons learned? I mean, both of those, I think would be part of our lessons learned and I'm keeping, I'm going to type up what we've got so far from our discussions yesterday and today and our hope was to move this along because this is just chapter one of lessons learned. And I think chapter two of lessons learned and it goes to your point is what have we learned that we actually want to make permanent? I mean, what have we learned that we want to really change? So I think that's part of chapter two, but this is fluid. I would say anything at all that's pretty high level at this point is game. Is that fair, Brian? Yeah, yeah. Because I think there are lessons learned that we need to be able to make sure that we have in place for if we have another kind of crisis situation in the fall that may not be permanent. Like I would like us to make sure that we have this issue around open meetings that they don't have to have a physical location and so that we don't have to deal with that again if there's this. But that isn't a permanent change. That's just our, in my opinion, that's not a permanent change. Right, that's through the crisis. That's through this pandemic crisis. Well, or what if he in, we're talking about COVID-19 and that's the way all the bills have been written. Right, right. So if the emergency is declared over on June 3rd and then in September 3rd, it's declared an emergency again. The things from COVID-19 will not kick in because that's a different emergency. So we, I think- It's still the same disease. It's still the same emergency. I don't think it is. It says till the end of the declared emergency of COVID-19. Right, but that's what- All our bills say. I get it, but a resurgence will still be of COVID-19. So it will probably have to enact, it'll probably have to be another executive order, but it will still, it can get booted back into action the minute there's further action by the governor. I think we need to be clear about that. That if the emergency is declared over on June 3rd, if the emergency is declared over and then there's another emergency declaration, what I think we need to do is we need to make sure that all of those things that ended at the end of the emergency declaration of COVID-19 will be able to kick in again. And that might take additional legislation because so I think we need to make sure that that's how that will work, Brian. Yeah, I thought actually Senator Pertzler had a pretty good idea this morning in this regard. He talked about having an omnibus bill that took into account, for instance, from the agency or from the Committee on Transportation, the license renewal, the inspection of vehicles, all that kind of stuff. So they would have one section of it. Government operations would have a separate section of it with all the flexibility allowances that we gave municipalities. The Health and Welfare Committee would have theirs in there with deadlines that were extended and all that. So we'd have this huge bill that we could just call up once, pass it and a whole thing would be just like it is now. And I thought that was a pretty good idea. I think it is a good idea. Yeah. So it would basically be the same things that we've done now. We wouldn't have to talk about them again. They would just go back into effect. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But I think that it's going to take a piece of legislation to do that because I don't think they're gonna automatically go back in if there's a new declaration of emergency. Okay. Dale had a question about, let me open the chat up. You had mentioned three bills for Friday, Madam Chair. S-124, S-233, what was the other one? No, no, 233 and 248, two bills are not dealing with one Friday. They're in finance. We're done with them. 220 was the other one, Dale. What, yeah. 244 is the only one. Right. But we're only talking specifically about S-124. Yeah, we're done with 220 and 233. Okay. Yeah. We don't have to do them again. Brian is all set to report 233. And I can report 220. And there you have it. Thank you, Senator Calamar. Okay. You're welcome. All right. Anything else? Nope. We'll see you when the all Senate call tomorrow. Oh, when is that? How do we know that? It's at noon tomorrow. My, my break tomorrow. Okay. All right. See you then. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Gail.