 Hour here, mercifully, Friday is almost over for us to Tim. We've got to we've really been on a roll with your bills today. The committee's got the draft, I think. Oh, this is got some updates in draft 3.2. So, do you want to run us through the suggested changes here while we're running a couple minutes ahead and then we'll take the testimony. From our witnesses, thank you very much for having me chair McCarthy again for the record. My name is Tim Devlin legislative council. And before you, you have draft 3.2 of the bill, which is dated today this morning. Then also, I have updated the bill summary, which I believe Andrea has just posted to the website just a few minutes ago and what I got to her a few minutes ago. That is so the real significant changes to this draft have been really the removal of the subsection D of 1992, which had permitted a vote with the legislative body to be voided and then also the removal of the prior section 1994 having to do with employment restrictions has also been removed. This is restricted municipal employees from seeking outside employment that would conflict with their position advocating on matters related to their position after leaving office and sharing confidential information that's been removed. And actually, it's been replaced, I should say, rather than completely remove the section number has been replaced. Now you'll find inserted a guidance and advisory opinions section that replicates the guidance and advisory opinion sections of the state ethics code that is 3 VSA 1225, which will enable the executive director of the state ethics commission to provide guidance and advisory opinions to any individual with respect to a municipal officers duty regarding the municipal code of ethics and any other issues related to government ethics. And then, aside from those three large changes, some of the nomenclature has been updated just to make sure there's consistency with. I think there's a few off references to office official versus officer. Also, the definition of legislative body has been updated somewhat to include reference to fire districts. And let me see if there's anything else here. Okay, I, and then I should say, really, that's about it. There's a little bit in a preferential treatment, but perhaps we can get there. If we go through, and that kind of sums up the, oh, sorry, I should say. Also, they're the trainings references, both the initial trainings for in office municipal officers in section four and existing in session law. And then also the to be added to statute new language regarding trainings for municipal officers has been somewhat updated. It's replicated in both. And this essentially shifts it from a our requirement to really having training be completed. In a manner, really designed in a manner is to achieve improved competency in the subject matter that is rather than rely on fixed hours of training. And that I believe summarizes all the training. Sorry, all the updates since version two chair McCarthy, would you like me to go through the specific language now or just kind of leave it there for now. I think that since we have some witnesses that I that I believe are going to give more general testimony. I might say that we can kind of full. Doing a more detailed walk through the big takeaways that I just wanted to get on the table was that, you know, we're in this draft, starting to really respond to some of the leads feedback and others about making this, you know, really a little bit more down for Vermont municipality. So the idea of, you know, that that kind of complete prohibition on being employed within a year that that, you know, would have potentially created some problems we've removed that language. We've removed that voidability language that had become kind of a focus. So we're trying to get down to a clear version of the bill that really gets at the conflict of interest and other issues that I think are the differential treatment for instance that are kind of at the top of the priority list for the state ethics commission and the supporters of the bill so appreciate your work and kind of the iterative nature of both of these ethics bills. You put in a ton of time. You're very welcome. I will just go off screen then and stand by if needed for questions. Thank you so much. Alright, so make sure that now that the directors here that have a sense of the wrong show. So, would you like to have the commissioners testify first does that seem like the best. Okay, great. Thank you so much. So, I'm sure all wrong. I had to testify, but I would suggest Michelle get testified first you want to account for the notes crunch. Okay, wow. Well, thank you for deferring. I appreciate that. Michelle welcome. Thanks for joining us. Can you hear me okay. Okay, now good. Yes, I can fine. Thank you so much for having me here. Thanks for being with us. So I just, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background. I won't talk very long at all. And I basically wanted to leave myself open for any questions that you might have. Thank you for joining the commission in April of 2019. So I'm coming up on my five years with the commission. During that time we had a lot of stuff going on the ethics that finally became law in 22 and thank you so much to the legislature for doing that I was so excited that day. And, you know, then we started with the municipal ethics and what, what we found over the past five years that I've been a commissioner is that more and more people were asking, well, you know, I don't have any place I can go to, you know, for ethics on disabilities and things. And of course we had no way that we could do anything with it. It wasn't within our charter that we were given by the legislature, though we were finally asked by you to come up with something. I joined the commission back in April of 19, because I've really, really wanted to help the people of Vermont. And I felt that this was a way besides telling them that they owe too much in taxes or something like that, that I could help them, you know, with a really part of the whole governmental scene and individual scene of ethics and how it relates. I had originally been on the tax advisory committee appointed by Governor Douglas and realize how much I enjoyed being able to do things that would benefit Vermont and its citizens. So that's why I kind of said yes when they were looking for a representative from the CPA society. What I found out recently, and I appreciated the comments from Carol yesterday, not yesterday, a couple of days ago I listened to it at night. What I found out is that I've gone to the Kogel conferences. I've gone to two of them. That's the council on governmental ethics legislation, I believe, if I have it right Carol. But I've gone to two conferences and have learned a lot from other states, but this most recent one that I went to in December they talked about the whole. The finance campaign finance issues but the few places I went to about the municipal ethics, you know, that states are starting to really look at it if they haven't already. And the one thing that I learned is, yes, you know, there needs to be enforcement later on, you know, that's not what we're talking about now, but they talk about how training. And if it's done right, can influence the amount of non ethical complaints, the amount of them how many will go down if you have the training out there right that it will solve a problem of having to enforce too much because people are getting the training of what could be kind of scrutinized and everything else so. But basically my background, you know, I've been a CPA for 28 years, don't look at my picture on the website that's a really old one and I need to update it but I swear I am really Michelle I'd CPA. But if anybody has any questions for me I'm more than happy to answer them or give you any other background information you'd like. I think the overarching thing that we wanted to get a sense from. We've been deep in the weeds talking about the language in these bills for a few weeks now. And in your experience over the last few years as a commissioner I'm wondering. What are the kinds of issues, the ethical issues that the state ethics commission is helping with. What are the things you see as needs where we're not meeting, you know, the needs of municipalities, especially with the powers that the ethics commission has now. You know, if you were going to make a pitch to somebody, especially the people around this table for why we need a municipal code of ethics, I think that's, that's the biggest thing from your perspective that we're trying to get it get today. Okay. Probably the biggest thing is, I really hate to disappoint people. Okay, and if we're getting calls because a person feels that there's been preferential treatment or they're involved in too many pies and state in municipal government or something like that and they want to know who they can complain to, or who they can talk to about it. And to this point, we can't even talk to them. And, you know, our office does a incredible job with talking to kind of getting to the need of an issue when somebody calls up and says, you know, this is my problem. This is what I think, you know, what do you think. And, you know, we either give them guidance, we give them advisory stuff or we send them on to whichever state government organization that would take care of it. In the case of the municipalities, we have to say to them, well, call your legislator or you want some more calls on that, right. They don't want to call later call Secretary of State's office they don't want any more of them either. And, or go to the government your municipal government well that's kind of where they're coming from in the first place, you know you're not going to if you're getting screwed by someone you're not going to go to that person and complain that you're getting screwed you're going to try to get somebody out and I apologize for not being more formal with that language but that's the way it's bright afternoon and this is when we tend to get a little punchy I think you're okay. But anyway that's, that's really, we need to be able to assist the people of Vermont in the ones that have real concerns about conflict of interest and everything else that are like a lot of the calls and what can they do about it and I think by this municipal bill and I read the changes this morning and it looks great. I think that's a way for us to show the people that we really do mean that we're going to try to do something you know I've been on the commission and how to hear all the comments well you've got no teeth. You know what good is the commission right now. And you know we hopefully we've proved it by coming up with the state statute and now based on what the legislature had us do is to come up with municipal ethics that we are making a difference and that is really important to me. I also wanted to ask what kind of a time commitment is it to be a commissioner on the state ethics mission right now. What kind of a what what kind of a time commitment has it to be that accountant appointee on that. Well I definitely tell him I don't make the April meeting unless there's a vote that needs to happen. But you know it it varies. In 19 we were coming up with the state code of ethics, not a statute but the code of ethics and you know there was a lot of extra time involved in reading over things and stuff like that. Then you have a lot of the meetings are just we're talking about in executive session about complaints that have been received and things like that. Most of our meetings will go somewhere usually closer to hours and that's only once a month but there's a lot of outside work to that. We need to kind of research and make sure we understand what's going on look at draft bills you know that can all be done in a two hour meeting. So, I, you know if I had a put an estimate on my time as a commissioner, then I probably say somewhere around 10 to 15 hours a month, but it's kind of off and on it could be less could be a little more. You know it's been a little more lately but I gladly do it. I mean, do I get compensated a little bit but not anywhere near what I could be earning here at the office for 10 to 15 hours worth available work. We appreciate your service. Anybody else on the committee have any questions for Miss. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. I really appreciate it. No problem I'd like to just kind of hang around I'll go off screen but yeah please do listen. If you do want to raise your hand or chime in. If you do want to comment on something I definitely open to that in this, in this particular hearing. You know, you shouldn't have said that because members of the commission will tell you how much I love to comment on things. Thank you. Well, would you like to join us on the table. Thank you. Oh, of course. Good afternoon. And thank you chair McCarty and committee for inviting me to testify today. I don't want to go over what Michelle just said except to say that I will echo everything she said I agree with everything Michelle said. And I could discuss the details of these two bills. But instead I think I just spend a few minutes trying to put a human face and human voice to the ethics commission. So I'm the chair of the ethics commission. I joined the ethics commission early. This is February 2019 just a few months before Michelle. Just thinking about myself for a few minutes. I read for the bar I passed the bar in 1986. I was an assistant attorney general for five years. I went into private practice, mostly appellate work and representing members of the disabilities community. I worked for the Vermont Human Rights Commission for 15 years. And I left the commission and retired from state service in 2015. I also retired my license to practice law. But nonetheless, I continue volunteering with attorneys to do pro bono work. I put in a lot of time actually hearing that. As far as being on the commission when I was appointed in 2019, as you know, there were very few workable ethics, law of the laws, guidelines, enforcement mechanisms. And also in 2019, the ethics commission was hurting just beginning to recover from a misstep it had taken in 2018, which somehow united the three parties all condemning the act of the ethics commission. I don't need to go into it. I really want to hear the glory details, but we were the reputation was recovering. And I think that since then, we have recovered well I'll go into that in a moment but just to say, Michelle mentioned the Kogel conference, a gathering of state governmental agencies and good government organizations that come together once a year to work on issues of ethics and workshops, etc. I went as a newbie as a new member of the ethics commission. And to be honest, I was kind of embarrassed being there because I was hearing stories from all many other ethics commissions, their scope of authority, their, their accomplishments. And they asked, so what are you doing for ethics, I'd have to admit basically we're toothless we don't have clear guidelines, etc. I'm so thankful that this committee in just two years ago, unanimously passed the state ethics code, which is a set of guidelines, and then that went on to be passed unanimously in the house and then sent a fantastic first step. I think that the commission has recovered from its misstep in 2018. I hope that it has regained the reputation it's good reputation with legislators and the citizens of the state of Vermont. And of course we have a superb executive director as you probably already know, and I am thankful to work with four really wonderful and smart ethics commissioners. I think we have a good group. And so as you know the Vermont ethics puzzle still has some missing pieces, municipal ethics and some sort of enforcement protocol. But that's it we're working on it. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I'm open to any question she might have. I just want to put a human face a human voice to the ethics commission. So, we have been wrestling with some concepts in here. I just wanted to, before we kind of dive back into the details of the bill and thinking about, you know, different provisions apply to kind of take a step back this afternoon and talk to you about the work that you're doing. But I don't want to shy away from the conversations about specific elements one of the things that we've really been struggling with, I think is in regards to the municipal code of ethics. The idea of sort of where should the, the sort of place for complaints live. You know, we've gotten some pretty strong testimony from the modeling cities and towns that has cautioned us. I think in this draft, we've sought to remedy some of the things that the municipal perks and treasured association and the league said, you know might be a little too much for the municipal code at this point. But I'm wondering if you have thoughts around the capacity of the ethics commission, you know, assuming that we provide at least an additional attorney to be able to, you know, engage in the work that municipalities that needs to be done both on training front and on the calls and complaints that you might now have the ability to respond to. You know, if you feel like you can tackle all of those things if we do provide some additional staffing resources. I do believe that we could handle municipal ethics complaints if we had adequate staffing. And you get a better idea for Christopher what kind of staffing we need my understanding is that up to half of the phone calls and other messages would get on with regard to municipalities and not with regard to state public servants. So, I don't know if one additional attorney would be enough, frankly, and addressing a question of where is the correct place for these complaints to go. I do think that questions of governmental ethics should even must stay with government as opposed to some independent advocacy organization. I've worked with Vermont, the cities and towns in the past I respect them they do wonderful work. But their job is to advocate for cities and towns. And to protect select board members, city council members, etc. I think I just repeating myself, I think the right place would be the ethics question. You know, somebody certainly within the state of Vermont. Questions for ethics commission chair. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you'll stick around to for. Thank you so much you should. So, right. And you'd given us kind of a higher level summary of what the state code does. Do you think it would be useful to kind of bring the committee back up to the 10,000 foot level. I was trying as we think about this over the weekend and prepare to try to get into some final drafting on both of these bills over the next week or so to kind of leave the committee with sort of a framing of what we're trying to do because I had been feeling even myself getting kind of lost in the weeds and the complexity of thinking about what would be on disclosure forms. Exactly. Yeah, I just want to say because I know how I brought up an instance where there was like a head up in the early early days of the ethics commission. And I want to bring that that up as an example of like why a code is needed. So I believe at the time I wasn't there. So and I wasn't really involved in the details but I do know that there was an outside organization that asked for an opinion on a loan taken out by the governor that may or may not have been commercially reasonable. And so that was the, and so the ethics commission did issue an advisory opinion. I think there was some controversy over whether they whether they should have done it or not, but it was that time when there was no quote of ethics in place. There was no clear guidelines. And so if the code the state code of ethics have been in place at the time, there would have been much more clear guidelines that would have been, first of all an outside organization wouldn't be able to ask for an advisory opinion that was one issue because advisory was not for one's own conduct. But again, all those rules would have been placed and you would have been asked the very clear guidelines about what is, you know, correct to have and what is not correct, and the perception that something wrong was happening. It could have been something that the governor might have wanted to ask for himself just to clear up those issues, you know, for example. So, I wasn't there if I just wanted to give that as an example of where a code of ethics having some ethics is actually beneficial. Right. Sorry. So I thought I would just take it back to, yeah, a higher level and we're looking at the municipal code of ethics and using the state code of ethics as a framework. Because I mentioned before that the state code of ethics is you know covers very basic principles. And so what we did at the time because it does look like very convoluted it doesn't look like to be very burdensome. When you're looking at you know the 16 pages of languages there, what is actually doing is quite simple. And so what it does and this is I'm using what the state code of ethics as a reference because I did do this distillation two years ago. I don't really have the opportunity to see this distillation, but what the code essentially does is says who is subject to the code of ethics. It says who is not subject to the code of ethics, then it details the core provisions that are included in that code. And so we're talking about here are just very basic progression, very basic provisions that cover conflicts of interest, the rules for when and how you have to disclose a conflict of interest. You can direct others to act unethically, which basically just says public servants or in this case, municipal officers could not direct others to do what they cannot do ethically themselves. Don't participate in a matter after you've recused yourself. Avoid the appearance of unethical conduct. Don't get people preferential treatment. Show favoritism. Don't use your state position for improper personal and financial gain. Don't use the information for improper financial gain. Don't use state resources other than for what their intended purposes. Don't take gifts if they're meant to influence you. And don't make unauthorized commitments on behalf of the municipality. And we've taken out the limits on other employment. I believe there is a reference to not having personal involvement in a contract. You are a municipal official and you are involved in that contract, but that's basically it. So it's actually white, a short list of things that people are prohibited from doing under the code of ethics. And frankly, things that people should already be doing their right. But I don't think there's anything that's conceptually, you know, ambiguous here. I don't think there's anything that's going, you know, off track in terms of just what are standard ethical provisions that we find everywhere. And we have them, you know, encapsulated in very clear, clear way, clear law. This is what you should do. This is what you shouldn't do. If there's confusion regarding a specific set of facts, come ask us at the ethics commission and we'll help walk you through it. And so I do think that we are out of place that, you know, we did hear from the cities and towns and we heard from Carol dies. There seems to be agreement that there should be uniform principles to cover everyone. And there's nothing to be pretty good agreement what those principles should be. I took a look at the document that Montlake of cities and towns submitted two days ago, and their language was different. The principles that were encapsulated in that document were the same as what are in the municipal code of ethics that has been before you this last few weeks. So it does seem like you really do agree in that for area. I think maybe the question has been the process by which those principles are put into law shall you say. And so, from our perspective. Simplicity. And so you feel like doing it at the state level is the simplest way to do it. We've tried another way when you have the voluntary adoption or required adoption of a conflict of interest provisions, but then it was kind of left up to Mr. Palli is as to exactly when and how they were going to do that, even though they were given some general guidelines. So we tried that way. We tried it. And again, we've had these conversations when it came to state code of ethics because there was a question to each agency just, you know, ramp up their own policies should he just let them do it give them some general guidelines and that was on the table with state code of ethics and legislation that took place on the Senate side. They said, how about we just give them some general ideas and then let each branch of government develop their own and it was decided that no, that was not the way that we should do it. We should have one set of principles in law. And it's important that it's important to make the decision between a law and a policy. And I made the point that each, we want there to be a common understanding amongst the people who the code applies to, but also amongst the public. So that's what happens. We have that one standard that is set into law at this higher level that everyone develops a common understanding you develop a common culture when it comes to government ethics. And so that was something that was discussed previously when it came to state code and it was the decision that was made by the committee at the time that no, ultimately, it was better to put this into state law and have a state code that applied equally to all branches of government. So we have that had that conversation before, but just continuing on in that vein a little bit. What we're really looking for here is simplicity. We're looking for and we're looking for ethics commission to be able to provide services. So I don't want that to get lost with what we are looking to do for municipalities. We don't even have enforcement in front of us as we're looking to help them in order for us to be able to help them. We do need that one standard that, you know, comes into place at the same time. Not, you know, this year one comes in this year next year, six months using the same language that when somebody calls us, we can actually give them that guidance that's been built up over time with a common understanding is going to make things much more clear for everyone. It's going to make it easier to provide those services. And ultimately, I think you're going to see that people really appreciate the fact that this has been done. There's always, I think, worries about what could happen when we look at the state code of ethics people really had a lot of fears, and I don't vote those fears have like come to be. We really have not seen any problems with state code of ethics at least we're not hearing anyone complain about it. And from our perspective it's working quite well. And as you can see, you know, last year we had three requests for guidance with 29 complaint inquiries we had 15 complaints. We had other kinds of inquiries compared to the year before we had three complaints, you know, maybe a dozen complaint inquiries maybe like a couple of requests for guidance. So people are starting to use our services more because they see the value of them. And that's happening as they learn about us more. And to Paul's to Paul's point, you know, he's right we're arguing those municipal calls are ready that we can't do much with. We do try to help people to the extent that we can. And I do think that if we had another attorney that I do think that as a starting place we have one attorney who could really focus on municipal ethics. I do think now, especially since we're not going to be delving into complaints really going to be focusing on training advice and guidance that that is a good starting place. And then in the future if we need more will know that we need more. But the idea is that that one particular position would be focused on municipalities and providing in person training. We do try to make very compact 45 minutes to an hour because we know that people, their attention span gets lost. We learned this when we develop the state code of ethics to train us online. And I'll say it's not as engaging as it could be. We tried it very quickly, but in working with cats. They were like, no, please make this as short as possible because they spend, you know, all day training people they have their specialist over there. And the key is to make it short, clear, concise and people walk away with a clear understanding of what information was there without trying to drag it out as people lose interest. So having like one concise strong online training and then have the availability as someone from the ethics commission to come and give in person trainings when requested. I think that's a really good starting place for us here and the ability to give advice and guidance and using us again is kind of like a sort of a past for when it comes to complaints will provide those services to people. We can help them with their complaints, let them know if this is really an ethics issue, but it's also from data collection. So that will get a better understanding how many complaints are actually out there we know how the Secretary of State's office is categorizing complaints as ethics complaints and tracking data over here, but this will allow us to do that to do that to another extent. So then we come back in the future to look at what's working what's not working what we change what don't need to change. We'll have a better data set in front of us to as well. So we're going to go back to the record. Second, I think you're already kind of asking questions in regards to the latest draft or if you would like, yeah we have a little time here. I also wanted to give the lead sometime before we hit the three o'clock hour. I would like to give us some critical comments. He had sent yesterday, a number of edits to the last draft some of the technical changes have been incorporated here by legislative council. I haven't really had time myself and I think other folks in the last 24 hours to review everything so it may be that some of those suggestions are great and we just haven't quite gotten there yet said I just want to let you know I haven't abandoned the document that you said I just had time to process it yet so but go ahead yeah. I think it's going to be as well, you know, it's in here from, from there. Yeah, and if they are, you know, if there are specific areas of concern though I'd love to just sort of flag them and say I've got a concern or a question about this because I want to try to get to a place where we're starting to hone in on what might be the final structure and then over the next week. And then really then again and looking at the latest draft here and I'm not. This is on the particular the conflict of interest piece. And just, you know, it seems that I mentioned this before it seems like an awful lot for me to flow folks to do. I noticed that we don't even have to do that in the ledges. I mean, I haven't seen it if I, if I refuse myself or especially before it's just an accusable recusal under, you know, 75 a letter, right. And so I just, I just think that particular piece is a little bit over the top. Yeah, and, and I guess even to go further. Yeah, it looks like there's a new word in here under preferential treatment. A municipal officer shall act in partially and not unduly favor or prejudice any person and then I understand that because that goes both ways. But then you get into the next section that says an office shall not give or represent an ability to give on new preference or special treatment to any person because of their personal wealth position status. I mean, that's kind of specific one way at least in my reading. And I'm just wondering about the other way the other prejudice. And why there's nothing in regards to that maybe that would be a little bit difficult. I mean, you could. You could prejudice somebody in the sense that you haven't been dealing with them on a personal level. And you're, you're not going to support whatever they're coming before the board with that. And again, it could be, you know, in opposite way, as far as health goals. I mean, you might think, oh, Jesus, this person really could use a leg up. So I'm going to support this person for instead of the other person's more qualified because this person I feel need to leg up. I mean, those are the, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying about the imbalance. I see. And I think you could probably change it to financial status. I think maybe using the word wealth is maybe throwing it off of it. So generally speaking, people are going to have some kind of personal bias. What we're looking to get at here is you have a personal bias for a specific reason that's going to relate to your relationship. Or because, you know, when we talk about wealth, we're really talking about like the ability for that person in the future to do your favor. So you're kind of looking for a quick pro quo in that situation. So those are the types of situations that we're trying to get at there. When you're talking about somebody who is going to act in a way to punish someone, I think we're kind of getting in a situation where we're looking at conflict of interest, potentially retaliation. So those would be covered under those situations. And when it comes to conflict of interest, I, the situation you mentioned where it said, if you are going to recuse yourself, you would make a statement. That's exactly the same in the, this code of ethics. So if you're going to have to make a public statement, and that means tell somebody else that means say it in a public meeting, but you don't have to do more than that. You only have to follow the form. If you agree that you have the conflict of interest with the appearance of one, but you think it's okay for you to go forward. That's when you make the filing. Yes. Again, we don't have to get back. So we have a particular and unique structure for the way that we look at the need to recuse and in our rules and in mason's. And it's very clear that our duty to make a decision as members of the general assembly is so great that we shouldn't accuse ourselves unless we have a direct word that uses a community interest in a decision. So, but I don't think it's all that different actually practice so most of the things we do here, we would have very little ability to vote on a question that just impacts us. Whereas the idea here is like, you wouldn't want to vote on a contract that specifically for your business, or a grant that was going to a family member, right, which is the kind of things that unlikely we as legislators would have. So legislators vote on things where we might be impacted as part of a large group, for instance, we're all taxpayers, we vote on tax policy, it may raise or lower our taxes, but we're not treating ourselves any differently than we are our neighbors who are similarly situated in that class of people. So that's, that's where the difference is, but I actually don't think it's a difference that's about treating municipal officials with more scrutiny than us in the general assembly, it's actually just the nature of the two jobs are a little bit different. But I think that the principles of the state code of ethics are probably the same and director server do you want to comment on that at all. Okay, so legislators. This is the narrow place where legislators were given an exception for constitutional reasons under the code of ethics as it was passed. There was a proposition that the code of ethics should cover all public servants equally which is based mainly what happened, but there were genuine constitutional concerns when it came to legislators and a constitutional responsibilities and so we looked at what's happening in other states and we agreed that you know if there's a carve out in particular situation. So there is a different standard for legislators and it is because of the constitute state constitutional reasons. So that's how that came about, you can always adopt the higher standard if you wanted to but the decision was made to leave it as it was for those specific reasons at the time. And I will just say I just want to make clear that filing the non recusal statement isn't meant to be a punishment it's meant to increase transparency, but it also can protect the person because there can be a situation where people are using that person and having a public interest, and that person knows they don't think they could come to the exhibition and ask them to do and we could agree that you don't, but you'd want to file that non recusal statement. So that's there publicly and you can explain your reasons and even within that you can say, I respect that's a big mission to get advice. I mean, it's not an accurate representation, but you know you can ask for an advisory opinion. So you can say I recognize there's a conflict I recognize there's an appearance of one. I'm going to publicly acknowledge it. And so this will hopefully, you know, satisfy people to within their understanding that I thought this through. This was the result it isn't something that I just blew off and said I don't care. Again, I think it states in there that in that letter of recusal, you don't have to be lodged any personal or. confidential confidential so yeah if you're if you're cancel is well if you were accusing yourself and you just have to say that you are using face of conflict. If you're going to move forward you're not required to you get client confidential client information you're not required to disclose that something like that. Other question. Right. Anything else you want to leave us with for the weekend as we're. I mean do I'll work on distilling as I did with the state court of ethics, but do you think that's helpful and did that for the Senate is two years ago and they appreciated it, just to show like really what the core principles are here because I know it gets to get very convoluted about the legal language and sexual language but really what we're talking about is pretty basic at the end of the day. So I'll try and work on that. I think I'd like that. You don't just let me know. Did you want to get some kind of where we're at right now I feel like we're in the middle we're going to transition here and trying to weigh all the different levers and we've taken out a couple of the things I think we're key concerns for you and for the clerks but I know we probably still have some work to do here over the next week or so. The record Ted Brady from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. Just a quick reminder because there's been some confusion in the committee about what we are we're a nonprofit non-criminalization organization that provides municipal assistance to serve and strengthen. There's a lot of municipalities. There's exactly one and a half people at the league that do advocacy. The other 50 people provide legal opinions to our members provide risks on women insurance liability insurance all these wonderful services. And on and on and on. So we are actually an instrumentality of our members are not a private nonprofit organization. Every single city in town and state of mind is a member of the league. So we do come here speaking on behalf of our cities and towns. Thanks for the edits that you made so far I do want to just point out that we've made several recommendations about how to go about dealing with ethics reform that have been dismissed as of now, related to centering it at the municipal level want to acknowledge that that's what we're asking you to do. Without that we did have some recommendations on the language because we think there are problematic elements within the language that if you do not take that advice would be would need to be addressed in order for us to actually operationalize them. As I said, the version you have before you still puts a wedge between local officials and the voter, and creates. It puts the state between the local official vote. So, why is that important. Well, to this day, you've heard from exactly two municipal officials. I think given that this bill would impact more than 6000 municipal officials around the state of Vermont elected appointed lead, you need to hear from some more. This is a complex thing that you're proposing it's going to impact day to day operations and municipalities, it will have an impact. And you need to hear from them about how it will actually impact them. That includes 4500 municipal employees that we track there's more than that a state includes 1200 select board members includes 1000 planning commission members includes 1000 volunteer development review board is only board of adjacent members more than 500 listers 450 city clerks treasures town clerks treasures and their assistance auditors and hundreds of others. When we looked through the language, this is extremely, I think connected to I think, Mr. Sherman, you mentioned some things you haven't gotten to yet, halfway there. Training requirement is a good example where this is going to become a problem. We agree that training is the best way to get people to comply with ethics and conflict issues policies. The problem is you're proposing that all, you know, 6000 plus people need to be trained and that every town and city in the state is going to retain those records for multiple years. You've been to your town meeting all those people that run the polls, all those people and bringing potluck goods to a to a town meeting are covered by your policy as it's written. So they need to get trained in order to do that. That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. In addition to that you're looking at what happens if a local municipal official refuses to take the training. Are you proposing that we're going to unseat them someday? Are we proposing that they're going to be fine? But there's nothing in this bill that says that, but why would you have a training requirement? There's no repercussion for taking that for not taking the training. That's going to come up. Somebody who's going to be the person that says, I'm not doing this, they tell me what to do. That's, you know, I have line by line items that I'm concerned about. I don't want to drive you crazy on a Friday afternoon. So I will submit this for written testimony. But a couple I wanted to really highlight just to give an example of like what gives me angina. I'm a big guy. I should take better care of myself. There's some provisions about the non-recusal process, which are really important, right? The idea that a three-person select board that third person is going to have to vote, even if they're conflicted. There is a non-recusal process in there. It doesn't specifically say that if it's the size of the board that's the problem, you can still go. And even if you don't work to use yourself, because that board needs to operate, right? So I think there needs to be a little more work done in that section to specifically allow that. I also think there needs to be more work in that section to recognize how this works. Somebody can't call the ethics commission and expect an opinion to be turned around and 24 hours, right? They're going to take time to figure out if there is a conflict. And so there's some timing issues there as well. I also think there are some issues with if you go to page, let's see, 10. I can't read my think line seven regarding unauthorized commitments. I think that may need some revision because municipal officials can't make commitments on behalf of their municipality. Now that's just the law. So is it really an ethics issue? This is a gray area that we keep running into. And also, page 10, I said I'm not going to do this to all of them. Don't worry, there's just two more. Page 10 line 10 regarding benefits from contracts. It's another one of those issues that I think the intent is well meaning, but as the language reads now, you're any select board, and you happen to be, you know, the guy that mows the lawn in town, that's just what you do. It not only says you can't vote on that contract, which makes sense. You might need to accuse yourself. It also says you can't take the contract if you refuse yourself, right? You cannot benefit from a contract. So probably needs to be some work there to allow the recusal issue and then that goes back to what if you can't refuse yourself because you're a three person select board. Some concerns there. I am proposing removing some elements of the whistleblower protection provision to specifically the issues we're relating to civil action, which are God. Page 14, I think lines 10 page 15 lines 10 through page. God. Page 14 line 10 to page 15 line 11. Again, going back to the ethics training, we think we think removing the requirement is necessary or it's really going to be complicated. That's it. Those are my thoughts. Final reminder, we think we just, we'd really like to hear if there's more municipal officials. I have no problem. We have taken a lot of testimony. We're happy to hear from municipal officials. So if there are folks who would like to suggest we will get them on the calendar before we move this bill, of course. I just have a clarifying question about the issue you're talking about. If you can't take a job if you're, if you have refused yourself. I wasn't sure. Could you say like more about what the issue is there like. Yeah, there's a, there's a prohibition on benefiting from a contract in the current code. And it doesn't appear. I'm not a lawyer. It doesn't appear. My lawyers also think this doesn't appear. There's a way for you to benefit from a contract. Even if you were cues yourself. So, let's say you are the only game in town. You are the person that runs the plumbing business, the whatever it is, and you're on the select board and the select board decides to pick your company to do work in your town on town land. I think the language as it is now says you can't do that with a good reason, right? There's an nefarious action there that could be occurring. But in small town Vermont, it oftentimes isn't nefarious. It's just the reality of that small town. There's not another plumber for 100 miles. So that's what I'm trying to get at. Yeah, just to say that is exactly one of the cases in one of my towns. We definitely need to work on that provision. Tim, I hope you're listening and can work with 10 director separate to try to definitely capture, but that it's my intention to really go over the all of the edits. I noticed that the word doc that you had sent has like all of the track changes and comments from the attorneys at the league. So there's a little homework for me to do over the weekends and a couple of others of us who have been kind of diving into this language. Because I do want to work with the league. I'm one of the work reps I have about throughout how this is played out is I think it's unfortunate that it's gotten to a place where it feels like the state ethics commission versus the lead because we have a specific policy choice to make that and tell them to get your testimony identified. It's, you know, do we have complaints really go to the ethics commission and have the ethics commission be the home of where where there's go from the public about municipal officials. Or are we really saying no, we're going to kind of keep everything down at the municipal level and I think after talking with members of the committee and discussions that we've had. We want to make sure that we're thinking through how this is going to work in practice. But at the same time, there's a consensus that the leads role is to support municipalities and that creates kind of a difficult thing for the member of the public, you know, to hear the commission's chair testify earlier. To go to the municipality and then they get support from the league who's supporting that member of the public who's totally independent and doesn't have a dog in the fight and the league. We enormously respect the work that you all do for our towns. I was a municipal official for six years. This is not a day on the league. I don't want anybody to walk away from this conversation thinking that this committee or the state of this mission don't respect the league. But in this policy decision frame that we have around who's the home and the arbiter of some of these complaints. We want to make sure that the code is clear. That's the work I want to do over the next couple of weeks. But that there has to be a place where there isn't any dog fight. That's what we're trying to do in the league has to support towns. That's your whole mission. So anyway, that's that's I just wanted to really get on the record here that like we're not trying to create an animosity between us and the league or the ethics commission and the league. We really want to work with you to get something that will benefit from my side of this bill. I appreciate it. I know that many of you have served in local government. I know many of you are familiar with the sentiment that they don't want my player intervening in local affairs. And generally, this committee has been pretty good. I'm saying you recognize the means to balance so I appreciate it. I'm trying to find that. I'm listening. It was a little harder than I thought. But we're trying to make the time to do it right. So thanks to anything else you want to leave us with credit. So we'll do a little work. We'll do a little work over the weekend. I'm sure there'll be some emails flying back and forth Monday, Tuesday. And we'll try to get back to this on Wednesday and be a little bit closer to sending this thing on its way. And if it needs a little bit more time, we'll have the week after time you break to totally run out the clock. But it's not going to be like a big appropriations or ways of means conversation about these bills. I've said that. So, thank you for all the great work. Thank you to the commissioners and folks from being here. And hearing this better thoughts that folks have that didn't. Make it in today. Please, you know, Andrea and me members committee. This has been. Big week. There's next week. We're going to have a ton of work and a lot of the week off the time meeting break. So I wanted to tell the committee before we adjourn that we will be meeting at nine to pick up on Tuesday when we get back. We'll be meeting at nine to take a look at it. And make sure that we look into the go box jurisdictional questions that we didn't really focus on when we did the drive by of that abatement bill that includes the elements from 641. But there were some questions about that this morning. That's why we delayed action on that. So this coming Tuesday. So we'll be, we'll be meeting early order chance and testimony. We're going to hear from hopefully a number of different stakeholders about how that bill. Blended in ways and means outside of the sections we've already reviewed and awesome. Yeah. It's still late for two days. So that'll be on Wednesday. We'll have Tuesday and Wednesday before three to. We flag concerns on Tuesday or want to hear additional testimony. We would have a little bit of time and we could always ask that our colleagues on ways and means give us a little bit more time if we feel like we need it. So just want to make sure that we respect our process and that was the better part of valor sometimes is to the brakes represent people. I don't know if we've talked about this or considered it but including the surgical issue in the bill. Seems like it could be either mechanism for it not to get reviewed by the members enough or a big rock to take it down to the bottom pond. I wonder if we I'm not asking for an answer. I'm putting this up consideration. I wonder if we should consider that as maybe a committee standalone. As opposed to rolling into something that just deals with everything. So I've been thinking about this a lot. I was able to talk to a few of you individually and I think just after the initial testimony we heard yesterday, there is a variety of opinion on this committee about whether or not we should try to tackle this. I really appreciate the suggestion of doing it as a standalone. I would like to take some more testimony on it. I do not want to bog down the PR bill and I do not, especially since we're adding as of today, a couple more things that I would try to squeeze in for crossover. I think where I'm at right now is if we want to continue to work on this. I think we could draft a bill that includes those recommendations to represent through her suggestion. That we could get the PR bill out with the other elements and that we could have a crossover when we're not quite so under the gun time wise, we could consider that standalone takes some testimony. I'm interested in doing that. And, you know, potentially either include that as an amendment when the PR bill comes back, or something like that. So I think my impression here is that there's not a clear answer. I mean, it really takes some significant testimony to get to a place where a majority of folks on the committee felt like they had enough information to make an informed decision. That's part of why I wanted to have, you know, the sort of, here's the report, here's the high level on both sides of it. Yesterday was to get to a place where I felt like enough of you have been able to say, I don't know, I need to know a lot more before I want to vote yes or no on this. It's not clear and it hasn't been for years. I would love with all the work that went into that report to be able to just out of the work that OPR did either way with a clear decision about we're going one way or we're not this year. But all of the other things we have before us are just going to take a lot. So I don't know how folks feel about that approach of taking a little more testimony on it after crossover but I think that that's the compromise I want to suggest to all of you. Representative Burr, I find that more discussion satisfactory. I think that the downside and some of the stuff that we're talking about as we expand the field of individuals are doing something. I don't know whether it's baseball, motorcycle riding, basketball, you get better when you practice a lot. It just doesn't seem to me like there would be enough of the procedures to keep everybody short. Well, I think if we take more testimony, we should really look at the market and what OPR's information. I'll say the first thing, need and cost is something they didn't address, which seems to be typical to somebody. They tried to address it, but they got conflicting information is what I heard about yesterday, which is tough for us because we'd love somebody who's an expert to tell us what to do. Which is kind of across all the questions that this issue brings up. That's the problem is the experts are telling you opposite things, right? Without turning this into a policy conversation right now, totally not what I'm doing. I'm not trying to end it. I think taking the time to really do a comprehensive conversation brings some more testimony from stakeholders after crossover and whether we included an OPR later, committee will rub it, whatever. There's a couple of options that we could pursue. We keep this conversation going. It's a year's long conversation. Both sides have a lot of emotions on it. And I don't think we can do it justice in the next day. Thank you. I'm, I'm rather relieved to hear that and I have one thought to put this in perspective. We are taking something, a set of skills that is typically has been historically regulated by the board of medical practice and putting it into. Our committee bucket because in the board of medical practices upstairs with healthcare committee. So now in our bucket into the office of professional regulation, because they are the ones who regulate optometrists. So I'm not comfortable with moving from that jurisdiction up there that really understands medical practice to us who are not medical professionals making that decision. Oh, and I think the thing I would leave with is regardless of whether or not we. Take up scope expansion. It won't be the legislature that's regulating the profession. And the, you know, we get into this all the time with scope expansion, where we as citizen legislators are being asked by the regulatory bodies to approve the statute. We're not going to have people in Vermont, but for us to, you know, we are not going to play board of medicine here. No, my point is, I agree. And my point is that OPR shouldn't be the board of medical practice either. I will leave it at that. I'm glad we have a couple of weeks with a long break in between. All right. Great work this week, everybody. Let's adjourn and go off live. I'm glad we have a couple of weeks with a long break in between. All right. Great work this week, everybody. Let's adjourn and go off live.