 Okay, yeah, great, great. I didn't realize that. I mean, I saw you on one of the programs you did that. I remember you did it every time. Good. We need our collaborators. Yeah, you can shut that door. It keeps a little bit of the noise down. Okay. Why was the library not open yesterday afternoon? That might be new paper. We were over in the... I just discovered looking for someone else. He was in the... I think we should close at 5.30. I meant his son. I thought you would be able to adjust. Yeah. Well, we took him on Monday and Wednesday. Oh. I had this great conversation. Yeah, that's all right. He's like a legend. Two late nights. That's why we have all the programs on Monday and Wednesday. Was there somebody before Ron? Yeah, this guy. We all go to... back there? I should know that. Welcome, everyone. I'm Lynn Blackwell. I'm a member of the League of Women Voters. And I just want to thank Michelle and the library for sponsoring our series. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, everybody, for sponsoring our series for, I think, almost 15 years. And we really appreciate that. This is the the fourth program in our series on electoral issues and democracy. Next month we'll have a program on March 13th on myths and NAI. The speakers will be journalist Dave Graham and Mick Cabay. I hope I pronounced that right. Professor Emeritus of Computer Information Services at Norwich. But tonight we have Tom Little who's going to give us his reflections on Vermont's legislative redistricting process. Tom lives in Shelburne practice law in Burlington since 1980. His resume is amazing. It is filled with a tremendous amount of civic participation beginning as serving as town moderator and on the local zoning board to his representation of Shelburne in the Vermont House from 1993 to 2003. He became chair at that point of the House Judiciary Committee. He's also served on many numerous non-profit boards including VSAC and various commissions. But especially for tonight's program he served as Vermont's legislative apportionment board from 2021 to 2022 the session in which we reapportioned the Vermont legislature just recently. So I'll turn it over to Tom. Thank you very much Lynn. It's a pleasure to be here with you and those watching from afar. When I started in the House of Representatives it was actually in 1992 because the person who represented my district at that time had resigned in 1991 after the 1991 session and it was a very tumultuous period of time because that's when Governor Snelling passed away that summer and Lieutenant Governor Dean became Governor so that the process of replacing that House member with a new one took perhaps longer than it might have but I was appointed and started in January of 1992 the month where the House started taking up votes on redistricting so I participated as a House member in redistricting in 1992 and again in 2002 and I served as the apportionment board chair in the 2012 period after the 2010 census and again in this last cycle I should add that when I was in grammar school in Burlington the UVM Extension Service which at that time was running educational television at least in my part of the state had a very interesting focus for civics classes on reapportionment redistricting because it was in the early to mid 1960s that everything changed. There was a sea change in the law when a number of federal courts and the Vermont Supreme Court made rulings that said the Vermont structure of representation particularly in the House but also in the Senate was unconstitutional because it didn't guarantee substantial equality in voting rights and as many people know up until that point every single town in Vermont had one member of the Vermont House so there were 246 towns and I love Vermont there's a few gores and unorganized towns that are hiding around but 246 House members one per town which included for example there was one member from I think I don't know whether it was London Dairy or Stratton I think had 37 residents they had one member of the House Burlington had 36,000 residents and had one member of the House so it was in the 60s that the court said can't do it that way anymore and that led to a sort of a six-year period of an initial try at redistricting there was a special series of one series of special elections for the legislative session had for one year had one body of members and then the next year they had voted on a new one so it took a few years to transition to it and you can imagine the really the local turmoil and trauma over the prospect of losing a member of the Vermont House of Representatives that your town had had since the 1780s it was as early as the 1830s that some in Vermont were concerned that there wasn't equal representation in the House the Vermont Senate didn't come into being until 1836 so Vermont was a unicameral had a unicameral legislature until then but in the 1830s there was concerns that the House was not equally apportioned and when the Senate was created it had a version of proportionality to it and that every county got one senator and then some counties with more population got additional senators and it wasn't based on strict arithmetic but it was at least an acknowledgement that equality of voting rights mattered and every so often over the next 160 years there were efforts made to reapportion the House that failed because the people who had to vote on it were the people in the House who were not inclined to vote themselves out of office but once a proportional representation became a reality the legislature created the legislative apportionment board it's a seven member board it's got an interesting composition each of the three major political parties by through their own party process chooses a member of the apportionment board so that's three the governor appoints one member from each of those three parties and the governor has complete discretion in how that choice is made and then the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court appoints the board's chair which is what I became it's a public body the apportionment board's meetings are open to the public and its records are public and we had a reasonably good geographic dispersal of the membership and we got started when we were asked to the apportionment board generally gets appointed the year before the census happens so they can start to get organized and so forth and then when the census results are delivered which is supposed to be in March roughly every ten years we get to work in with respect to the 2020 census it was late significantly late so that instead of getting the results in March we got them I think in August and there's a very tight turnaround because the legislature the law requires us to deliver our report and recommendations to the legislature I think in November because the legislature only has one session to grapple with it and get it done so that by that November's election actually the August primary the new districts are in place and the secretary of state and all the town clerks can get organized for those elections and the apportionment board makes recommendations to the legislature there are states I think there are seven states that do redistricting by a state established independent commission I think it's California is the one that comes to mind most of them are out west Minnesota is one and that that state established body itself makes decisions that are binding on the legislature and on everyone else in those states however they are subject to litigation and litigation often ensues people feel that even though it's an independent commission there's somehow somehow politics sneaks its way in and the courts often end up deciding and in some instances throw out the plan and tell them to go start all over again but Vermont has this process where the apportionment board does a lot of diligent work and delivers a written report and we make lots and lots of maps and one of the things that I have used for years is this thing called the Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer because when you start looking at drawing boundary lines for centered in house districts knowing exactly what is on the ground where you're drawing those lines is helpful we do have pretty sophisticated mapping software which is so sophisticated that I really don't understand it but I use this old fashioned Atlas which shows you every single little class 1, 2 and 3 road in a town and helps you try to be respectful of town lines so the board's methodology once the census results come to us is to look at what's called the percentage deviation in each existing district and let me explain what that is the apportionment standard is the state's total population divided by the number of districts in each of the senate in the house so if I was looking at some 2010 census figures the population was 625,741 so if you divided that by 150 you would get an ideal sized district of 4,172 residents if it were a two member district it would be double that the standard for the senate district was about just under 21,000 residents I should add that these are residents not citizens so the census looks at who's living they're not what their legal status is so we look at that ideal number and then we compare it to what the census says is actually living in that district and you get a deviation a positive or a negative deviation so in my example if you have a house district with a population of 4518 it has 346 people more than the ideal number for the apportionment standard which turns out into a deviation of plus 8.29% likewise if a district has fewer than the ideal number it has a negative deviation what the law tells us what the court has said is that we need to have minimum deviations that's what the law says in Vermont and elsewhere but it doesn't say what a minimum deviation is the way that gets measured by the courts whenever it's tested is that you look at a map of say all of the all of the house districts in your proposed map and you take the district with the greatest positive deviation and the one with the greatest negative deviation and you look at the spread between those two numbers and that shows you in a sense the district with the real high deviation in a sense compared to the one with the real low deviation is underrepresented in other words the voters in that district don't have as much voting power as the voters in the district that has a population much significantly lower than that ideal number and what the courts have said over the years is that the courts get nervous about ruling in this area because they see it as fundamentally a political process and the courts like not to get too involved in that but they have said over the years that a plan with something somewhat greater than 16% overall deviation may be problematic and as an example the deviation in the house reapportionment plan enacted in 2002 was 19% which is a significant overall total deviation no one challenged that no one challenged that so that's the core principle here the core constitutional value is that the districts that the apportionment board tries to turn into a map and likewise the legislature does has to make that deviation spread as narrow as it reasonably can there's three other policies that Vermont law tells the apportionment board to look at the first one is to try to preserve existing political subdivisions otherwise town lines town borders and county borders try to keep towns intact and not to subdivide them and put them in different house districts unless you have a real good reason why that wasn't possible in some cases number two recognition of patterns of geography, social interaction, trade, political ties and common interests in other words try to put towns if you have a bunch of small towns that need to be combined into a district find a group of towns that has something in common with each other they may have a school that they share they may have mutual ties in commerce they may be historic ties where they all sort of see themselves as part of the same part of the state you try to take advantage of that when you can and third and maybe perhaps sometimes most important make the districts compact and contiguous and there are some mapping standards for how you measure compactness I suppose the perfectly compact house district would be a circle where it can't be much more compact than that although town boundaries don't generally help you with that shape you may have seen over the years the term gerrymandering comes up when we talk about legislative redistricting and there's a famous cartoon from the 19th century from Massachusetts that showed how a legislative district was created that carved a huge loop the towns were contiguous there was no non-contiguity to it but the person who was in charge of that was a gentleman named Jerry it was not his first name his last name and Mander apparently was a term not used very often for a creature a mythological creature or a monster so gerrymandering the cartoon shows a scary looking vulture that shows how that district was laid out so compactness is important respecting town and county lines is important and patterns of geography social interaction trade, political ties and common interest is important interestingly the apportionment board is directed not to look at who the incumbent legislators are when we do our initial mapping the data we look at doesn't show us where the incumbent legislator is living in a district so we don't know sometimes we have our own anecdotal personal information about this but when we are reshaping districts to try to make the population more equal we don't know where the incumbent legislators live when the law is different when it gets to the legislature and probably no surprise they are permitted to look at where the incumbents live and would probably do it whether the law told them to or not but gerrymandering tends to come in two basic forms one is called cracking and the other is called packing and one of them is where if you have a this can be racially based based on racial bias it can also be on political affiliation if you one strategy is to put all of a certain group of people into one district so that they may control that district but they don't have a chance to be an influence in any other district the other is to take that group whether it's black americans or republicans or democrats and spread them around in other districts so they are a minority in those districts and cannot elect somebody but the brahmana portion of the board doesn't look at incumbents and I think that's a healthy thing when we look at this deviation information there's a whole list of how bad is the current map how bad are the deviations and if you have maybe a dozen or 20 districts that really need work because their numbers are skewed you might think you're in reasonably good shape but if you think about mapping whether we're doing a jigsaw puzzle perhaps there's a district in bennington county a house district that has too few people now we need to change the boundaries and add some more people so that district has a better number closer to the apportionment standard so you do that you've now affected the population in that district that you took those people from and now create a population problem in that district so you say well okay we'll go to the next district over and take some people from that and put them in this district and that can cause a ripple effect and what you find in doing this mapping is you do dozens if not hundreds of iterations of these maps trying to find something that at least from my perspective does as little disruption to the existing map as you need to while still achieving the substantial equality of population across all of the districts and that is is quite a challenge when the apportionment board gets to a certain point in its work it sends these tentatively proposed maps out to the boards of civil authority of all of the affected towns and says tell us what you think and the boards of civil authority in towns affected by the same proposed new district are allowed to get together and meet and talk about whether they share the same concerns and then their feedback comes back to the apportionment board to help us decide whether we can make any improvements in that that help satisfy the local concerns when you do the mapping it's interesting when you get to the spine of the green mountains where there are a lot of small towns that are the most that get bounced around the most from redistricting to redistricting every 10 years one somewhat of an aside and I mentioned before we got started here this evening a lot of the action a lot of the political rhetoric and angst and anger even in redistricting around the country is generated by redistricting of the U.S. House districts that's something that we don't have to worry about in Vermont because we only have one but until 1930 two we had two U.S. House districts and at various times during the 19th century at one point I think for a period of time we had six I don't believe there was a formal legislative redistricting process in place at that time but you can imagine what things would have been like now if we had in addition to all the state legislative districts we had to figure out how to carve Vermont into two U.S. House districts in a sense would be more potentially more at stake once the apportionment board ponders all of that response and concerns from the towns and issues its final proposed map to the legislature that's when it goes to the legislature and there's a committee in the House and a committee in the Senate that take the first swing at it their own research and mapping work although they tend to start with the work that the apportionment board has done I sometimes get the question isn't the apportionment board just spinning its wheels because the legislature is going to do whatever it wants to do and that is what the law allows but in practice the legislative committee seem to value the diligent work that the apportionment board has done and they prefer to at least start from that place as opposed to reinventing the wheel and the legislative process also involves outreach locally to get information reactions to what the legislative committees think they want to do and then they process that and ultimately have a final map that they vote on the House this is one of those rules that is sometimes honored in the breach the House and the Senate are sort of supposed to not mess with each other's redistricting plans for their own House but sometimes they do I think it was in 2002 that each of the House started fiddling with the other ones redistricting plan because they didn't agree about something else and they settled that ultimately there's been relatively little litigation over these final decisions by the legislature interestingly if someone wants to challenge how a district has been laid out that case goes directly to the Vermont Supreme Court it does not go through the trial courts in large part because there's not enough time with the legislature unacts new maps and the governor signs the bill let's say in May the primary is in August and general elections in November there's not a lot of time to fill out that happen there was one challenge in court in 2002 over Montgomery went to the Supreme Court 1992 Shrewsbury went to the Supreme Court Shrewsbury had for as long as anyone could remember been in a house district on the west side of the Green Mountains in Rutland County because it's a Rutland County town final proposal in 1992 put it in a house district on the other side on the east side with Ludlow and maybe one or two other towns and they weren't happy and they went to court and the Supreme Court denied their petition generally finding that the in a sense you can't make everybody happy and the process and the rationale for that decision was reasonable and I should add that when the apportionment board presents its proposal we do a very detailed written articulation of why we are putting these towns together in these districts also saying the alternatives that we may have looked at to do it differently in the Montgomery Challenge in 2002 Montgomery had been put into a Senate district in Orleans County Montgomery being a Franklin County town they didn't like that and the Supreme Court initially looked at it and said you didn't really do a very good job explaining why you had to do it that way send it back to the legislature they did some more work sent it back to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court was satisfied with that and then you have elections and new districts and sometimes an incumbent will no longer be in the district that they had been in I don't think that happens too too frequently but it can happen and then you wait until the next census comes around one of the things that I'm doing as the chair of the apportionment board is I've had some very preliminary discussions with the Secretary of State and it's the Secretary of State's office that staffs the apportionment board and gives us our resources for mapping is to see if there's anything we might do differently when this rolls around again it's easy to kind of let everything slide and you're saying we don't have to worry about that until 2029 or 2030 but that'll creep up pretty fast and I'm planning on going to see the legislative committees next year with some suggestions about how to tweak the process I see what they have to say I think they'll stop for a moment now and see if there are any questions or comments and then I have some more to do but I don't want to rattle on too long so would anyone like to ask a question about what I've said so far or about something I may not have said yes sir a comment you did make was who appointed you because I think that's part of the success of this commission it keeps it not political it's not coming from a party the question is who appoints the chair of the apportionment board and it's the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court so you have the three political parties and it used to be just the two political parties until the progressive party qualified to be considered a major party it was a five member apportionment board and then it's now a seven member board so you have six of the seven members appointed by virtue of the political process you're not allowed to be on the apportionment board if you're a sitting legislator you're disqualified probably wise but the chair is appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and a lot of the time you don't sense you're having a meeting of the apportionment board that there's partisan stuff going on but it's also not too far below the surface at times and I'll tell you and it's interesting the way I first got appointed to that is that then governor Douglas someone in his administration had approached me to see if I wanted to be appointed to the Vermont Labor Relations Board and I thought about it and then I went and was interviewed by two or three members of the Labor Relations Board and I thought about it some more and the person from the governor's office called and said what do you think I said you know I just doesn't grab me and she said oh okay well that's fine how about the apportionment board would you like to think about that and I said yes I'd really like to think about that and that's they contacted the chief justice and all of a sudden it happened but one of the kind of fascinating debates and disagreements within the apportionment board that also appears probably a lesser extent in the legislature is this Vermont has single member house districts and two member house districts we also have single member senate districts and we used to have I think three two or three three member districts one six member districts and a number of two member districts that's very if you look around the country that's very unusual in most almost every other state all the districts senate and house are single member districts and not in Vermont and there's a long long debate goes back decades over whether that's the right way to do it or not I think it dates to it's generated in part by how many towns we have in Vermont how small many of them are and this concern about not splitting towns so the last two times the apportionment board met in 2012 and 2022 we finished our work 2011 and 2021 there was a real split on the apportionment board there were three or four people who felt very strongly that one district should be single member districts and they felt that way because in their view single member districts are a just a sounder unit of representative democracy where there's one representative one elected representative and one district it's a one-to-one binary relationship and they feel it's better for communication between you and the district then there are people who don't agree with that who think that some of each is good and some parts of the state the two member districts work well and in particular well let me back up in both cases in both of those two times the apportionment board in 2011 a majority for the initial round four out of the seven members voted for a all single member house district map after the feedback came in from the board of civil authority a couple of them changed their mind and we went with a mixture of single and two member districts the last time around the same dichotomy happened and the map that was presented to the Vermont house all single member house districts and what you do when you I think there may have been somewhere in the high 30s of two member districts in Vermont when you break up a two member district into single member districts you end up subdividing towns a lot more and putting part of a town in one single member district and the rest of the town in a different single member district and people feel strongly about that some people say well that doesn't really matter because the single member districts are that much better that's worth giving up on that concern and the others say no we've had a two member district here I think since 1965 maybe not ever since then but the towns in those districts as a general rule tend to like it that way and they're used to it and they're comfortable with it and they don't tend to like to be broken up and redistributed that happened in Middlebury this last time around Vermont law does not compel one way or the other except the Vermont statute is explicit that both single and two member districts are permitted and you have to follow these other standards about compactness and commonality of interest and trying to keep town lines intact I believe that in the last session in the 2021-22 session there were still partisan implications for whether we had single or multi districts at least in certain cases and I wondered if you'd give us a reading on to what extent the contention over this issue reflects partisan differences as well as differences over compactness and history and the standards that you've already mentioned there is there's a view that it's easier to challenge an incumbent legislator in a single member district so if you're in a single member house district and you've been thinking about running you want to throw your hat in the ring that it's easier to successfully challenge an incumbent in a single member district than it is in a two member district now I don't know that there's ever been any methodical research that track that one of the theories is that if the two members in that two member district are both of the same party and there's a single member from the other party who's trying to challenge them a lot of the people who are going to vote for the party who has the incumbents are just going to check both of those boxes and not want to split their vote Mr. Chairman do you have any commentary on your personal experience on whether that in fact works out that way that is it's easier to challenge an incumbent in a single member district I think there's no question about that because I'm right about it it says both are not more than two and people use if they have two votes they're going to use them so they'll pick somebody they like from one party and then that might cancel out the vote for the single person so what people do the process I don't know it exists elsewhere but it's about getting a sponge meaning if you're one-on-one in a two person district get somebody to run with you even if they don't campaign in terms of that political party who's going to vote for both of them and not waste them if they see a blind vote they won't vote for you and somebody from the other party which is just canceling out the vote if you look at the party affiliation of the apportionment board members the last two iterations it was the Republican members or both of the progressive members curiously the Republicans and the progressives who united in voting in favor of single member districts not too often that they find common ground in that way but they did in that instance yes would a multi-member district better reflect the diversity of the area you've asked a great question for a segue in what I'm going to talk about next because Vermont has a the Vermont racial equity task force is a part of state government now that is in the governor's administration and at the beginning of 2021 which was at the beginning of the process of the apportionment board getting organized the Vermont racial equity task force issued its annual report to the governor and it wasn't focused on redistricting except at the very end it it asked proposed that considerations should be given to making racial equity an explicit criteria in redistricting decisions and it cited research from other states in the U.S. house redistricting process that had come to the conclusion in some of those states the there were flagrant tactics designed to suppress and dilute the votes of communities of color no one has done the research in Vermont to try to track that and interestingly the U.S. census data intentionally masks or suppresses the racial identity of residents in rural low population areas of Vermont and other states for purposes of protecting the individual's personal identities so it's very difficult for the apportionment board of the legislature to look at a district and see the racial composition but I'm sure there are other ways of doing that if you ask has that been in fact an impediment an unreasonable hurdle for the black members of our community I don't know I know that when this issue came up I went back over the last 30 to 40 years and identified those the black members of the Vermont legislature and I think without and again it was not methodical research to trace the ones that I could identify had been elected in two member districts including Francis Brooks from Montpelier Lenora Bright from South Burlington was in a two member district she was an early pioneer in that regard so it's a legitimate question to raise but and what you don't know whether there were black Vermonters who chose not to run because they felt that there was no chance because of the way the district was was drawn we just don't know that going back to the 1960s when you think about it I told you about Stratton versus Burlington 37 residents versus 36,000 one of the things that meant when those court cases were decided the Vermont legislature more so the house than the senate was very much a rural dominated legislature and and of course it wasn't until 1962 that a democrat was elected governor for it had been more than 100 years since that had happened so it was a very rural dominated house and senate that may explain why it took over 160 years to reapportion but the the evolution of the house because even after reapportionment happened there were still I think a strong presence of rural Vermonters in the house they had it over the last 50 years I think you can see how that has diminished over time and I know there's now a rural caucus in the Vermont house that's intended to try to rally people in different parts of the state around issues that are specific to rural communities whether it's school taxes Act 250 or something else I want you also to think about the reverse of that so when in 1965 Burlington went within a relatively short period of time from having one member of the house to having eight or nine maybe even 10 or 11 and that was a wild time in Burlington because there used to be there was one person that got elected all of a sudden now there were nine new house districts and nine places for people to run and it was that's when I was probably 12 years old it was a pretty exciting time if you had an interest in politics and my dad had been on the Burlington City Council and served in the house voted on reapportionment in 1972 came up that time I just find reapportionment fascinating in part because it draws you into these maps and you end up looking at where a town is located is it on the side of a mountain is there a river where's the school district what's the best way to try to form a house district so that there's some commonality of interests you're not subdividing towns and it looks like it just sort of is a good fit I remember my first time on the apportionment board I was doing some work at home on the weekend and it occurred to me that if we put the town of Newbury in with Bradford that would be a really good fit and I was really proud of myself and I mentioned to somebody who lived on the east side of the state and they said you can't do that they hate each other they've had a football rivalry between those two towns for 40 or 50 years and it'll say it'll never work I think that was somewhat of an exaggeration but that's the kind of stuff that you find in Vermont not just from but you see it maybe we're more sensitive to it here at times and the more you can take those things into account I think the better the representative democracy works because the people who are being asked to go to the polls and vote feel like they have something in common they share things and just think it makes it a better unit of government when they're sending people over to the state house in Montpelier and how are we doing we have about seven or eight more minutes I have a question please but I wanted to go back to the question of Rachel I'm wondering if you could explain you said that the courts don't want to deal with political partisan gerrymandering that issue they feel is political and not legal issue but when we look at the congressional districts around the country of course the Supreme Court has ruled on a number of mal-apportioned districts based on I'm assuming the Voting Rights Act and their need to review any issues of racial inequity now could you explain how they would distinguish this between that and partisanship at this point and how Vermont might deal with that if that came up in Vermont I think the courts this is not although I'm an attorney I'm not well versed in the law of other states around that type of concern but I think the courts would tend to look at partisan gerrymandering one way and racially motivated gerrymandering a different way so let's suppose that Vermont for years and years was a two-member house district and I don't know how they ended up this time around whether or not it's still a two-member house district so let's suppose somebody said they were concerned that because of the robust immigrant population in Winooski that's been going on for 20 plus years somebody is concerned that maybe you would have members of an immigrant community be elected to both of those two seats in a two-member Winooski district and they said we can't have that we don't want immigrants to control the legislative process for Winooski so we're going to try to draw those lines so that we're going to put all of those people in one district and we're going to pack them into one district so at least there's one house seat in Winooski that's not going to be elected by immigrants I think that would be very troublesome and likewise the other form of gerrymandering would be to split them into districts by drawing funny lines so that they wouldn't have any power in either district and I think if it was done on a racial basis I strongly suspect the Vermont Supreme Court would find in their best judgment to rule that unconstitutional it's worth study I was glad that the Vermont racial equity task force raised the issue but there isn't to my knowledge any Vermont based research to show that I mean it's sort of some of it this is intuitive and because the census tends to suppress the identities it makes it harder to do bad gerrymandering or to do better gerrymandering to suppress the identities in rural areas but I'm assuming they don't mean urban areas how would they treat them differently how would the census treat rural areas? somehow they'd do it again they're worried that if in a very small thinly populated area the census told you what the racial identity was and that the people would figure out who the BIPOC people are and that would have bad consequences for them because they'd be discriminated against I guess we were very unhappy with the performance of the U.S. Census Bureau along with most other states the last time around because I mean it's a huge undertaking to do a decennial census and it was about five months late and that really made our work very very hard yes less weighty question do you as redistricting boards across the country know each other and confer you have built meetings or anything like that? you spoke about commonalities and you couldn't put these two towns together because they were football rivals and if you've got a state like Texas or Illinois or whatever do they get down to that level in their discussions? don't know and I'm not aware of any there's a national association or conference of almost every conceivable interest group you could imagine I was not aware of one and I didn't go to a convention for it so thank you very much for your attention and your questions thank you happy to be here and register and vote see you at town meeting