 Welcome back to the House Human Services Committee on Wednesday, February 16th, and this part of the morning we're going to be focused on the legislation that will become a committee bill around the opioid settlement and setting up a process by which that money will be distributed or whatever. And I have asked the Vermont League of Cities and Towns Karen Horne to comment, because if you recall from our walkthrough of the bill with legislative counsel, they have a role. And Karen was sort of surprised, maybe not. But Karen, why don't you take it away with your, you had some comments and testimony. Yeah, thank you very much, Madam Chair. My name is Karen Horne and I represent the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. And I'm going to say at the start, thank you for getting me to focus on this bill. There are two of us following issues in the legislature this year. And it just seems like there is an awful lot of legislation affecting local governments. So when you focus me, that's a really good thing. So we also do think that this is an ambitious bill and you've got $63 million over 18 years, I guess, to accomplish everything that is contemplated in that bill. I hope it can happen. I do have a couple of questions which I sent to the chair a little while ago. I think it might be helpful to say on page two exactly who the committee is advising. You say that it has the support of the Department of Health, but it just might be helpful to make that clear. I did have a question about how the number of nine representatives from local government was arrived at. It seems like maybe you are trying to balance the number of local people with the other appointees of the committee. Karen, I was going to answer that for you. That's a requirement of the settlement. The national settlement has put some requirements on the distribution and part one of the requirements is that there would be some kind of advisory or some committee in charge of doing that. And the members need to be half representing local and half the state. So that makes sense then. I would suggest that particularly with respect to an appointee who is assistant judge, that you ask that association to make that appointment. We wouldn't be comfortable making that appointment. We don't know who all the assistant judges are. And it is sometimes difficult these days to get people to serve on committees, particularly local officials who are doing it sort of on top of other volunteer service. So I mean, we will try. We will go out and try to find nine people or eight, I suppose, from local government who would be willing to serve. But it is sometimes tricky getting that number of folks onto a committee. And not just this committee, any committee these days. And then with respect to the uses of the opioid abatement special fund that is in the bill, it seems to us that it might be helpful to make eligible funding to support community justice centers work because they are in the towns at the local level and they are working on restorative justice issues and they do end up addressing a lot of cases where opioid abuse is a factor. So that might be something to add to the list of eligible uses of funds. And as I read the bill, those were really the main questions that arose. And I'm happy to answer any other questions or question. Yeah, no, Karen, I really having an outside eye ask questions I think has been very helpful. And I mean, specifically your comment about the side judges that you're not the appropriate body to appoint a side judge makes perfect sense. And whether or not, and I think we need to as a committee need to hear from someone for either the Attorney General again or someone else. It is my understanding that the uses of the money is very specifically outlined in the settlement. So I'm not quite sure the flexibility that we have to add other pieces. And so your your suggestion I think is an interesting one. And let's find out whether or not we can and the opioid settlement money can be used for this. Your suggestion, the Community Justice Centers, which do phenomenal work. Yeah, and they've been, I mean, I just, I mostly mentioned that because they have been somewhat underfunded the past several years. And they are trying to do a lot of this of this kind of work. Have you shared that with the Judiciary Committee that they've been underfunded? Oh, we have over time, but not, I would say not in the last week or so. Well, you know, many of us, many of the committees now are putting together memos to appropriations about priorities. Right. That's a good point. Okay. Do people have questions? No, I'm just wondering if people have questions. And we do. We have two questions, one from Representative McFawn, followed by Representative Whitman. Karen, last night, I gave a presentation to the select board in Barry Town. And part of the presentation was some information about this opioid settlement. They were absolutely clueless in terms of what I was even talking about. So I guess this thing is so new that the word is not out yet in a certain percentage. We don't have the money, Robert. Robert, we don't have the money. Well, I know we don't have it yet, but my point is, somehow the cities and towns should at least get some kind of notice that it's available. Yeah, we did. Back last summer, we worked with the Attorney General's office, Josh Diamond, and sent in the mailing list for local officials to give notice that this was in the works. We did put an article in our November, December report newsletter that goes out to 3,000 and some local officials. So I can send that to you, and I can certainly send it to the select board as well. Well, if, yeah, okay, you can send it to me. I can send it to them, or you send it out however you want it. But I'd like to get what you've sent out. That'll give me a good idea. Yeah, thank you. Okay. Yeah, I did send that to Representative Pugh last evening, I think. Oh, I believe I did. But I'll send it to the whole committee. I haven't gotten that far back. I've got what you just sent me, Karen, in terms of your questions. I haven't gotten it to last night. Sorry. Thank you for sending that. If you send it, Karen, if you send it to Julie Tucker, our committee assistant, she'll make sure we all get it. Okay, that sounds good. Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to just follow up on some of the comments that you made, Karen, about the size of the committee and the ability to get different town representatives to participate. I'm just kind of, I think, alluded to the fact it could be difficult to get eight or nine. And I just was wondering if you could have like a direct comment on what you see as sort of a range of the size of this committee, because I can imagine people might want to be included on the other end, which could potentially expand the size of the committee. And what do you see as the capacity or the preference for town's participation? Well, our recent experience with getting local officials to volunteer to serve on a number of committees is that it's been a little more difficult during the COVID pandemic, even though, you know, you don't have to travel. But I had suggested that maybe seven would be a better number for us, a more feasible number. But it's really sort of just a guess at this point. Nine struck me as that would be a difficult number for us to meet. Of course, if the assistant judges appoint one of their people, then that gets it down to eight. So I can't believe that I'm saying this to a community because usually we're like, you need to put more of us on the committee. But this is nine is a lot. Nine is a lot. And what I don't remember, maybe someone else does, several local communities themselves joined the suit. And so some of those communities might in fact want to join me. Yeah. So I hear your concern. And I listened to Representative Whitman's comment that others may want to join the committee. And I listened with trepidation as to how large a committee can get and be effective. That is another consideration, certainly. If you've got an 18 member committee, that's getting on the large side. And I believe Josh Dummond might be able to correct me, but I believe there were six communities maybe that sued on their own in Vermont. So we should resist the urge to have people on the other side of the committee. It seemed like 18 was a large committee as it was. Yeah. I mean, and I think Karen's question or point about being clear who these are. In the testimony, it seemed to have been from Monica or Josh. It seemed to be clear that in a sense, this will be like a special fund. And so therefore it will go through the same appropriations process that anything else does. This group will make a recommendation that the fund will be sort of in charge, you know, will be within or something the Department of Health. And in the world of state government, the Department of Health has to present their budget recommendations to the Secretary of Administration who then brings it to the governor. And so and then they bring it to us and we put our own stamp on it. So that's my understanding that it is to go through the same process, but that a group will be making recommendations and much like some other special funds, much like some ARPA funds, how you spend it is going to have to or how you appropriate it. It's going to have to meet the criteria which is outlined in the bill which reflects and is supposed to reflect what is required by the settlement dollars. Plus there's an extra step but they have to actually request the dollars. So we're not going to get this lump sum of money. Oh no. They have to, the lead agency will need to request from the settlement manager people at the national level for funds. So it's definitely a bit more of a complicated process. The scenario that you mentioned, Madam Chair, is what happens for instance with the Clean Water Board. They advise the Secretary of Administration and that then goes into the budget and is part of the governor's proposal. I think we just want to make, yeah, yeah. So but I think I appreciate your comments that maybe that's not so clearly outlined in the bill. And so whether that is something that needs to be changed amended. Are there other questions or comments that we have for Karen? Just one quick one. The comment that was made in our first walkthrough about the language employed by Towns. Is there another alternative that would maybe be more inclusive of say select board members, city council, town officials or Karen, in your understanding, does employed by the town cover that? No, that could be, that's a good question. That could be, I think, interpreted to mean employees. So maybe what you might want to say is nine local officials and local appointed or employed. How about elected or elected? Yeah, I mean, yeah, right, right. Exactly. Elected or appointed, sorry. Or employed. It's the same thing as employed. Well, it kind of is, but you could say employed, but I think you do want to say elected, elected or employed. Okay, we have more appointed in our town than we do elected or employed because they're all the committees and the select board appoints them to be on the committee. And they're definitely not employed. They're definitely not making any money. No, they're not making any money. Okay, thank you for that. Thank you for bringing that question back up. Karen, you have been very helpful and we're not voting this out right away. I think we're going to my, my goal is that we vote this out the week we get back from town meeting is to sort of give it time to percolate kind of thing. So if you have other, if you end up having other thoughts and questions, please do let us know. Okay, thank you. We will put it in our legislative report this week. So I may get some, you know, some comments from local officials about it as result of that. But thank you for the opportunity. And thank you, Karen. Thanks for putting it in your update because that is a way of getting the information out. Appreciate that. All right. Thank you.