 Well, good afternoon. This week I've had several opportunities to speak about the opioid epidemic. And more importantly, to listen to others speak about their experiences, from those in recovery to those working on the front lines in this crisis, our continued attention to this issue is so important, because nearly every one of us has felt the impact of it. It's touched every community and every family in Vermont in some way. And if you don't think it has, you just don't know it yet. The devastation the opioid crisis has on families is heartbreaking. And progress sometimes feels elusive. But Jolinda Leclerc, my director of drug prevention, who will speak shortly, often reminds us that we must remain optimistic. Because if there's an opportunity for someone to access treatment, then there's hope. And this attitude is how we have to approach this crisis. As I've said before, success will be counted one life at a time, a young man in recovery going back to work, a mother seeing the light in the eyes of a child once thought lost forever, a community free from fear of crime and violence, and one less child brought into this world affected by addiction. This will be success. My team and I think of the challenge as a four-legged stool, prevention, treatment, recovery, and enforcement. As a team here will describe today, treatment and recovery are where we think that we'll make the most progress. And this year's report of the Opioid Coordination Council or OCC highlights opportunities to strengthen the efforts on the prevention side as well. Something we'll be focusing on as we move forward. While our work is far from over, Vermont has been a leader in addressing this epidemic like the public health crisis it is. I established the council to have people from all walks of life, including those in recovery themselves, family members and more, examine how we could do better, how we could respond more through their eyes and make sure we had greater coordination and alignment of efforts. This year's recommendations do just that, with a focus on where we can improve collaboration and integration in the areas of prevention, treatment, recovery, and intervention, as well as enforcement. The thoughtful approach by this diverse group has helped guide our work and help with efforts that are already underway. The council has been working closely with employers, providers, and advocates to create recovery supports, including a recovery-friendly workforce initiative and housing needs assessment. Through tobacco settlement money secured last year by Attorney General Donovan, the legislature and administration are moving forward on a number of recommendations on the council, as well as legislative priorities. Dr. Levine will elaborate on some of this work in a few minutes, but in summary, I'm pleased we're expanding our syringe service program, home visits for impacted families, and after-school prevention initiatives, in efforts to expand medically-assisted treatment for targeted population. I want to thank the Attorney General and his team for his partnership in ensuring a portion of the settlement went to support our work on opioids. And I want to thank the legislature for working with us on these initiatives as well. A great deal of credit also goes to many, including Jolinda and the entire OCC, as well as Secretary Gobay and all those from the Agency of Human Services. Dr. Levine and his team at the Department of Health, co-chair of the OCC, Jim Letty, Commissioner Anderson, the Department of Public Safety and Law Enforcement, and for their work to keep us safe and their recognition of this issue as a public health matter and our local and private partners around the state. Vermont continues to show this is not and cannot be a partisan issue. Republicans, Democrats, independents, and progressives alike have felt the effects of this crisis. Vermont's leadership in this area is a result of so many, over many years, across state and local governments and private partnerships. We are all truly in this together. So thank you for being here and I'd like to now turn it over to Jolinda to discuss more about the council's work and this year's findings. Jolinda. Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to be here. First, I wanna emphasize something that the governor just said and that is hope. There is always hope when somebody has a substance use disorder and it is important for us every day to talk about addiction as a disease and talk about the pathways for treatment and recovery. I wanna thank you, governor. I wanna thank you, secretary Gobey and commissioner Anderson and commissioner Levine and Rose Gowdy and all of the partners you see behind here, every one of these people has done something in the last two years to help us succeed in our efforts to move forward with the challenges we're facing with Vermont's opioid crisis. The council's job is to be a catalyst for change and that is exactly what the role the council has played in the last two years since governor Scott created it through executive order two on January 5th of 2017. We have facilitated multi-sector collaborations. I really wanna stress that. This is inter-agency, intra-agency, nonprofits and the private sector. All of whom have worked to coordinate and increase the impact of our resources. We've been building bridges to improve outcomes across the drivers for change to Vermont's opioid crisis. The council represents a partnership and it's been developing wide and deep. Our tables keep growing. We've had 50 to 75 people at the recovery strategy committee and the prevention strategy committee over the last year. And many of the strategies I'm gonna talk about today, they created these strategies because they live it every day. When we look back at strategic actions and progress in 2017 and 2018, we see improvements and opportunities for next steps. First, I wanna talk about workforce development. We all know we have a workforce shortage here in the state of Vermont and it is one of the governor's priorities to strengthen Vermont's workforce and ensure that employers have the workers they need. The governor led a summit on Vermont's substance use disorder workforce in April of 2017. Within five months after that, through a partnership between the council and the office of professional regulation, we were able to streamline the license, alcohol and drug abuse counseling professional certification. The goal was to get more licensed counselors in a shorter period of time. Next came the repurposing of the agency of education tobacco position. And along with the attorney general and the governor's office, we were able to turn that position into focusing on all substances and supporting a wider range of prevention programs in schools. Next, we're focusing on employment and recovery. And as the governor announced last January, the Department of Labor has now placed an employment consultant in recovery centers across the state. These employment consultants work with people in recovery on skills building, interview skills, resume writing and help them connect with employers. From that point, we are working with the Chittenden County Opioid Alliance and here is Christine Johnson who leads that effort. And we are working on an employer toolkit and a employer friendly workplace initiative across the state of Vermont so that we provide employers with the tools that they need to be successful employing people in recovery. I want to shout out Hugh Bradshaw who has helped us. Hugh works for the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. And he has brought resources to the table that we have been able to connect to both of these efforts supporting employers in recovery, employees in recovery and employers who are willing to employ people and use some strategic resources like tax credits and bonding and the employee assistance program. Next, Naloxone. We hear every day about overdose reversing. Naloxone is now in all 169 emergency response agencies across the state. And the health department has 42 sites across the state where they provide free Naloxone. Safe needle disposal. Here in Barry City, there were a number of people who saw needles on the streets and on the playgrounds. And so how did they respond? They built a collaboration. The Department of Health Regional Office helped to facilitate that effort along with Central Vermont Medical Center, along with the fire department and the police department and they created a toolkit which works to support sharps disposal and they established nine kiosks across the city of Barry where you can deposit the sharps to date. And it is in less than one year. 253 gallons of sharps have been collected. These are not just needles which people with addiction are just positing there. These are needles from people who have other diseases. Also deposit there because people want to dispose of their needles properly. We go to the expansion of medication assisted treatment in all correctional facilities as of July 1, 2018. We expanded and tremendous work by the Department of Corrections, the legislature and advocates for criminal justice. Rapid access to MAT, medication assisted treatment in emergency departments, Central Vermont Medical Center being one of them and we have a recovery coach here from Central Vermont Medical Center. This is a pilot meeting people where they are in the emergency department when somebody might overdose. The hub and spoke system of opioid use disorder treatment. Today we have nine hubs. The governor and the secretary announced the ninth hub in St. Albans in October of 2017. It has been working rapidly to have people move into treatment and we have 225 spoke providers. These are across the state, meeting people both in the more urban areas and the rural areas. We also have expansion of the number of recovery coaches across the state. Thanks to a recovery coach academy run by VAMHAR, the Vermont Association of Mental Health and Addiction Recovery and Peter Esmanshade will speak in a few minutes about how we are deploying recovery coaches in correctional facilities. We have a pilot program with new moms and moms to be and the list goes on. Examples of innovation under development continue the recovery friendly workplace initiative. Recovery housing, the first thing you need if you are a person with addiction in treatment and in recovery is a home. And we need sober housing and we have some. Right now there is an inventory underway done by Down Street Housing here in central Vermont with support by the Vermont Housing Conservation Board and it is a needs assessment as well as an inventory of what exists for our infrastructure with recovery housing. And transportation collaboration. The Agency of Human Services and the Vermont Agency of Transportation have come together to identify gaps in transit services for people in recovery who need to not only get to their treatment provider, the recovery supports, but employment as well. Lastly on this incredible list of what is already underway and been done is a shout out to the Vermont Department of Libraries. And I have Jason Broughton here who is the interim state librarian. If you all want to look over here, this is the healing library that is being placed in libraries across the state to address the needs of people with addiction and families with addiction. It is focused from early education through adults and it provides emotional healing and ability to address trauma in a way that everyone can understand. Libraries offer a safe place for community members to convene across the state and we could not be more pleased with this partnership that only resulted in the last year. So I want to move to priority strategies for 2019. Prevention, intervention and recovery are the primary focus of the governor's council. Prevention is the pathway forward and Commissioner Anderson and public safety officials say this all the time. The pathway forward is to reduce demand and that means to increase prevention services at the local and regional level. We feel the evidence is clear that an integrated approach across substances must be used to address the pathways to substance use disorder. Success relies on sustainable resources at the community, regional and statewide level. And this is talking about integration of school and community-based collaborations. We also focus on implementing a statewide multi-generation approach to prevention and the care continuum to promote protective factors and identify risk including substance use disorder, mental health and through screening and sustained home visits for pregnant and parenting women and their children. I do want to mention that there are funds to expand a pilot program that were included in the tobacco settlement. Vermont has identified a gap in specialized support for pregnant and parenting women where women are able to access treatment and services with their children. And what we know is that in their homes and in pediatric offices, this is where you meet people who have issues with substance use disorder and mental health challenges. Intervention, expand and reinforce intervention and harm reduction programs and services statewide. This would be expansion of syringe services programs. Again, there is tobacco settlement money designated now to expand these programs statewide as well as rapid access to medication assisted treatment and screening brief intervention and navigation to services. Lastly, recovery. We talk about a recovery bridge. Supports for recovery-friendly housing, employment and recovery-friendly workplaces and recovery coaching in order to wrap our arms around people in recovery to ensure they are successful in sustained recovery. As I introduce Vermont's commissioner of health, commissioner Mark Levine, I just want to know our goals. We strive to reduce the number of opioid overdose deaths. We strive to reduce the number of babies born into addiction, the number of children under age five in state custody due to substance use disorder, youth using illegal substances and the first date that they start to use illegal substances and the supply of illicit drugs. And we aim to increase community and school-based prevention that promotes resilience, people who transition to treatment through intervention services, people in treatment for opioid use disorder and people in recovery who have housing, jobs and human connection. And with that, I thank you and I will introduce commissioner Levine. Thank you, Jolinda. And thank you all for being here today. Like the governor, I have also been to quite a number of events just in the last week that all surround the opioid epidemic. And it remains very relevant. Jolinda gave you a very comprehensive view of what's been going on at the opioid coordinating council and I'll try to be more focused in my comments so I don't be redundant. But in the two years since Governor Scott did create the OCC, Vermont continues to set the standard for how we as a nation can approach this public health and public safety emergency. We implemented important policy initiatives and greatly expanded our systems of care and opportunities for Vermonters to access treatment services and supports. In fact, the hub and spoke system is now a national model as recently in New Hampshire, which just adopted it all the way to California. In these first years, much of what we have achieved have been challenging foundational efforts. These 2019 recommended strategies represent our embarking on deeper and ever more comprehensive approaches to reshaping our long-term systemic approaches. Statewide collaborative efforts that reflect our now greater understanding of the strengths and gaps in prevention, treatment, recovery and enforcement. Our approach has been to build a strong system of communities and professionals vested in the success of local treatment and prevention efforts. Our commitment and vision is broad because it has to be if we are to succeed. We will make abundant treatment, recovery and prevention investments across the care continuum. This is not a simple nor straight path and no one can say we're nearing the finish line. I can say, however, that we have accomplished so much that it allows us, if you will, the luxury of continuing to be visionary and innovative in our approach and to hopefully make life-saving progress. Our systems of care are making a difference. We've seen significant decreases in opioid use and emergency department visits, as well when you survey individuals as a reduction in family conflict, feelings of depression, anxiety and anger. More people who might otherwise turn to drugs and alcohol to cope report being much more satisfied with their lives. In the area of treatment, you've already heard how expanded our hub and spoke system has become. There is effectively no waiting list for anyone who wants to receive treatment services when and where they want it. That's a remarkable accomplishment for any state in this country. And we now have the capacity to treat anyone who so desires, which again allows us to be more innovative. More than 8,000 Vermonters are currently involved in our hub and spoke system receiving MAT. You heard a little bit about rapid access to MAT, a critical new initiative. Again, it follows the philosophy of meeting people where they are. This was launched at Central Vermont Hospital in 2018. It is now in two other emergency departments and expansion to more is planned in the next several months and through the rest of this year. Through the coordinated initiative of this council, we're continuing to expand MAT and correctional facilities, as well as refining the follow-up supports within and beyond the facilities. I want to mention in the area of intervention and harm reduction, which really engage people at very critical moments of risk and opportunity for help, the fact that we have an incredibly successful naloxone distribution program. Successful as it is, that is not enough. One of the visions we all have is that we will be able to enroll more people into medication assisted treatment because we've been able to meet them where they are. And that's why we are so committed to expanding syringe service programs. Building upon the current seven fixed locations, which are not all available five days a week, as well as a mobile unit operated by our partners, which include Vermont Cares. And it turns out that these provide a real connection for individuals with opioid use disorder to a community of caring individuals, to a community of individuals who can provide them with naloxone, provide them with counseling and case management services, provide them, if they so desire, with treatment at the time that they present, an escort to a treatment facility, or at one of our syringe service programs in Burlington, the actual ability to get their first dose of buprenorphine on site. These are very, very important initiatives. Jolinda spent a long time talking about recovery, so I will spend a little less, but we have 12 recovery centers throughout the state, and there are thousands, I repeat, thousands of Vermonters who are receiving services from these centers. Definitely at least double what the number was in 2014. The peer recovery coach movement is taken off fast and furious. Not only do we now have a certification program in an academy and a job description, if you will, but it's become a career path for many individuals. Recovery coaches encounter people with opioid use disorder at a time of high vulnerability and great need. Coaches in the emergency department program in Bennington, Burlington, and Central Vermont have served over 300 people already in a very short time period. And as I mentioned, we'll be expanding into other communities. There's also a Central Vermont and Chittenden County employment services pilot program, again, connecting people to employment opportunities, and almost 100 individuals have been involved in that. One of the many sites I get to speak about opioid use disorder in is the site where housing conferences occur, whether they be a statewide housing conference or one of our many housing coalitions. All of those individuals are very, very curious and very committed to understanding the crisis better and understanding how they can play a role. This is to no error of the OCC. It's been part of a strategy to educate the public as much as possible. Prevention, my last category. If you look at prevention from the prescriber standpoint, reducing the amount of opioids circulating in our communities, that number is down 29% since the beginning of 2016. If you look at the number of homeowners who have received at least one opioid prescription in the last two years, that has decreased 28%. We now have 23 state-supported drug disposal kiosks throughout the state. Over a ton of drugs has been collected just in the 2018 year from such sites. But taking this now to the individual level, away from the prescriber, we're really trying to work to prevent future generations from developing substance use disorders in the first place. So we're identifying risk, including SUD, through screening and a program of sustained evidence-based home visits for pregnant women and parenting women and their children. But prevention activities occur throughout the continuum of early and later life, and we need to be prepared to reinforce such activities over time. We continue to work closely with the Agency of Education regarding comprehensive school-based prevention efforts. We continue to have comprehensive messaging programs that reach the public in the social media that they utilize. We have important aspirations and ongoing work in the area of after-school activities. It turns out that the most dangerous time in an adolescent's life is between 3 and 6 p.m. That's when experimentation may occur with a whole host of substances. We've learned from evidence-based models, both here in the United States and in Scandinavia and Iceland, that there are programs that can actually impact youth during that vulnerable time and provide a strengthening core of principles and activities for them. We've come to understand the devastation many Vermonters experience, facing the daily challenges of seeing a loved one slip into addiction, overdose, and sometimes death. It has also been a privilege to witness individuals and family members work their way to successful recovery, moving forward with their lives and giving back to their communities. Our work continues every single day. It's my pleasure now to introduce Peter Espenshade, who is the president of VAMHAR, an organization so responsible for our mental health and substance use professional community and workforce. Great, thank you, Commissioner Nadine. Good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to just spend a few minutes drilling down on this concept of recovery and some of the real innovations in recovery that have come out of the governor's opioid coordination council. As we've been discussing and as we've known for some time now, there is an epidemic of addiction throughout our country. So understandably, a lot of the focus has been on some of the immediate innovations that have been needed to combat that with policing reform, judicial reform, and as Commissioner Levine was discussing, the great and successful reform that's taken place to get Vermonters into treatment. But what we also know is that addiction is a chronic disorder. It is not a simple infection that can be cured and then an individual is on their way. It is a lifetime chronic disorder that requires great love, great care, and real services. I think the innovations that have come out of this report, in my opinion, has been the recognition that hundreds, actually thousands of Vermonters come out of treatment each year for substance abuse disorder. And for them to be successful, we need strong recovery supports and we need a recovery workforce. That's something very novel, not just in this state but nationally. The concept that we're gonna have recovery supports throughout the state and a trained workforce to support these Vermonters doing the right thing, re-entering their communities through everything from jobs, families, housing, and transportation. These supports are not the smoke-filled basements of our father's recovery supports but really vibrant evidence-based approaches to managing a chronic disorder. And it really seems to be working. We're in the early days of putting our recovery workforce out into the field but there is great promise that we're seeing in early indicators. This isn't just something that we're doing, it's not just a report. We have a face to this, we have hundreds of faces to this. I'd encourage you to talk to folks like my colleague Liz. Liz works as a recovery coach up in the hospital in Berlin. She's been very well trained in evidence-based approaches. She is a dynamic person working at the hospital in addition to running her own business in the area, volunteering and re-entering society. Recovery coaching works. And Liz, we thank you for all you're doing to support these Vermonters. So in some, this is really recovery's moment. We're getting folks out of treatment and into this long time successful reintegration to health and wellness. It's important for us to highlight that but it's of a piece, it's all our moment. We believe and the report highlights that whether we're talking about prevention or recovery, it's about strong caring community connections. You know, in recovery, there's a saying that addiction thrives when communities don't. And we've known that for some time. And what we're highlighting in recovery, and I believe in this report, is that the obverse is true. That recovery thrives when communities thrive. That prevention thrives when communities thrive. That policing, judicial reform, all of these things thrive when we make our communities stronger. So I wanna give some serious kudos to the governor, to the OCC, to Commissioner Levine, to everyone behind me, to our recovery workforce, to realizing that recovery is not just the very simple old school system of recovery supports. It's all of us loving each other, caring for each other in ways that we know work, which is economic growth, employment, strong families, and good medical supports. So thank you. Thanks for all you're doing for us, and thanks for your time. Governor Scott. Nobody, no one else? Okay. Well, I'll open up for questions. Maybe first on the topic. Come on. We'll be right over those statistics of 2018, or we'll go up or down in the previous year. Sure, so we'll be actually providing a data brief next week. It's in preparation now, but last year's numbers were 2017 numbers, were 101 deaths. We've updated that to 108, because at the end of this last calendar year, several of our joining states informed us for monitors who died in their state of an opioid overdose. So we believe the number that we're going to have to compare to the 108 this year is going to be 110. So essentially the same, certainly marked reduction in the so-called rate of increase. Every one of these is obviously a tragic death. States are grappling now as we are with the marked increase in fentanyl circulating, and at least three quarters of the deaths that we've recorded involve fentanyl. So that just provides a whole new challenge across the country to try to keep people alive. And it makes all of the harm reduction strategies I mentioned, whether it be an eloxone, whether it be enhancing our service programs, whether it be increasing the access rapidly to MAT, all of those become even more critical because you need to be alive to have the benefit of MAT and begin to lead the kind of life that you would always plan to lead. So you believe that fatal overdoses will be about the same two more than 27. Exactly. So this is the second report. We hear a lot of the word success being thrown around. What metric are you using to measure success if more people are dying? Yeah, I mean that's just one measure, obviously. I much rather use the kind of measures that you were hearing about here regarding people entering recovery, people entering employment, all of the efforts that the OCC has done to try to make it possible to be reintegrated back into the community and have a great life again. I mean, those are the kinds of successes. And then on the prevention side, making sure that our youth and our adolescents are not going to go down the pathway that the current generation has gone down. Is that a success to you, Governor? Well, again, when you think about an epidemic, you think about the rate of increase. And I think, again, it's hard to use the term success when people are dying, but at the same time, to slow down the rate is important. So you have these recommendations seem pretty bullish across a lot of the wide range. What happens next with them? Do they need some results? Yeah, a combination of all the above. We want to continue the great work that's being done right now by all our partners, as well as we'll be initiating some legislative action that could be necessary. And this is a roadmap for the future, and we're going to build upon that and what we can do to expand all the areas, particularly in prevention, though, as you heard today. Well, there'll be some, Al, if you'd like to come up, Secretary Gobay. So if you remember the tobacco money, so there's money in the tobacco money pot that we have not put towards anything yet. And so we've been holding that in reserve, working with the legislature. So the question is, what do we do with that? The second point is there's things we can do within state government that don't take necessarily legislative action. So I just want to say that there's things we can do at AHS, for example, I'm more familiar with AHS than other parts of government, but that we can do when we learn new things. And just to go back to the success point, these are successful interventions. Meaning we're trying to say these are steps we're taking to reduce harm and to keep people safe and to get people into recovery and to make our communities better. This is an epidemic that we are not successful in yet. And I want to be clear about that. This is not a let-up moment or a declare success moment. When we completed the hub-and-spoke model so we got off the waiting list problem, that was a successful intervention. But that doesn't mean that this has gone away. This is a full-on problem for our state and our country. How much of that tobacco money is this much? I can get you a hard number. I believe it's 3.5 million, but I don't want to double-check my number. Other questions? You run the roads last night? As a matter of fact, I was. Well, just like any other winter night when it's about 29 to 32 degrees and it's raining, conditions were slick and I think, I don't think anyone was surprised at that considering all the reports about the increase of precipitation as well as the temperature changes that we're seeing now and particularly with the road conditions, with the frozen pavement and so forth, it leads to very difficult conditions to drive in. Have you got the V-trans response? Well, I think they did the best they could under the conditions. I was on the interstate as well. I saw a lot of trucks out salting, but when it's raining, it's pouring and you're trying to put out ply salt, it washes away almost immediately, but you're trying to do whatever you can. So I think their response was appropriate. I don't know what they could have done any different. I think that people need to take action when they see that we, you have to slow down, drive to the conditions and I think that again, we're seeing the change in climate and the severe conditions, the drastic temperature decreases and increases that we've seen this winter. It leads to adverse conditions. The Senate is talking once again about reapportionment. Can I, I'm just going to excuse anyone that doesn't want to be part of this conversation unless you want to come up and answer some of these questions. You're free to, you're free to leave, I'm sure. Dr. Levine, do you have a comment on that? I'm sorry. Take me with you. Yeah, the Senate's talking about, you know, the number of districts and it sounds like Chittenden County's going to lose senators, re-senators that might be the most effective county. What are your thoughts, general, on the representatives? I'm not sure that Chittenden County's going to lose senators. I think there's going to be possibly redistricting and maybe split up the county. So they'll have the same amount of representation that they had before based on population, but I think it does make some sense. It's a fairly large county and it's tough for the senators to get to every part of the county when they're trying to react to constituents. So I think it makes some sense. I applaud Senator Ash on bringing this forward and I think it makes some sense. You're back to the opioid question. Wait, wait, they're already left. Wait a minute. Dr. Levine. The perspective for the Secretary-Go-Base perspective are safe injection sites part of the state strategy? Yeah, not from my standpoint. Be happy to have Secretary-Go-Base weigh in on that as well. Absolutely. And so they began as what we thought of as needle exchange sites and the one in Burlington is actually what's now called safe recovery where you can certainly get clean needles but you don't exchange needles. Yeah, you're talking about safe injection sites? Oh, safe injection sites. Oh, sorry. Okay, let's start over. Rewind that a little bit. Okay, so what I would say is that the OCC took a look at that issue and came to the conclusion based on the facts that it wasn't something that would be a priority for us right now. And I think that we made the right decision. We have limited resources and we can give you the position paper on what we came to. But, and in the Wall Street Journal today, there was an article on what the federal government is saying about those again as of yesterday. And I think that would say that as we prioritize our resources, we made the right choice. You're adding up the numbers here, 2.4 million. In the digital funding you're calling forth. What's the impact of that? How much difference does that make in the case of another incremental step within the state's means? Well, it all helps, obviously. And could we use more? Probably. But I think the collaboration as well has been important. Trying to make sure that we're not duplicating efforts, redundancy and some respects and trying to focus on areas that give us the highest return, so to speak. So I think that that's been done through this process, but certainly the 2.4, 2.6 million, whatever it is, is going to be helpful. I assume you've heard about these posters, the white supremacist posters that targeted the synagogue in Berlin, as well as two LGBT organizations. Just your thoughts on the fact that our community is this article, you know, based on these campaigns? You know, really unfortunate. And obviously, we're not immune to this. But we can't tolerate those of us leaders, as well as citizens alike. We can't tolerate this kind of action. Well, free speech is something that we hold near and dear to our hearts. That's not free speech. That's hate speech. And we have to eradicate that. We have to stop that. We have to treat each other better. Do you have any thoughts on the arrest of the accused of harassing cameras? Yeah, again, I read that in the report. I've been somewhat briefed. But I don't have all the details in that. And I understand there was a rest made. Senator, a new version of the House abortion bill passed out of the committee this morning was two amendments. One, it took out any mention of taking away protections of fertilizer under Ramblin. Second, it made it very clear that partial birth abortions would be still illegal under federal statute. With this new version of the bill, is there a way where you would see this as a new support? Well, I'm pro-choice. I believe in a woman's right to choose. I've been consistent in that throughout my political career. And I've said, I want to wait for this process to work its way through. Obviously, there was a public hearing last night. It came out of committee this morning. I wasn't aware of what was in that particular bill. But look forward to the debate on the House floor and then a successful passing over to the Senate. But I'm watching. But it's a conversation that they need to have first before I weigh in on that. Did you read about or hear about any of the testimony last night? I did not. Obviously, I was out at an event last night. So I wasn't here to listen. But I'm sure it was hard felt. It was very well attended. I think the report was 1,000 people, which is important. I think people need to have their voices heard in this discussion. There are a lot of few tax and regulatory proposals. And we know sort of where you stand on this. But interested, are you in particular going to be pushing it all for the legislature to pass roadside slaughter testing? Well, again, if they want to move forward with this, I would advocate for roadside testing. I think that's part of where we need to go. We need to have to detect impairment on our highways and with any substance. And I think that this would be another tool that could be utilized as well. As we talked about in this today with opioids, I think prevention and education is so important. So we'll have the conversation, willing to. I've been open-minded in some respects. But there are certain conditions that I think that we need to take care of first. And I'm not sure that we have to rush into this. You always said that driver impairment was a key issue. And the tax and regulatory bill in the Senate doesn't seem to address your concerns. So did you have a hard time supporting that, Bill? Well, again, this will work its way through the legislative process. What I don't think their bill is much different than before. But I may be wrong. I haven't looked at it that much. And I don't think it's passed the Senate yet. Has it been introduced or hasn't gone to the pass of committee? It's going through the committee process at this point. So we'll see where it all comes out. I mean, it's a good discussion to have. I'm not surprised that we're having it. But again, I think highway impairment is so important with any substance as well as prevention. So would you have a hard time supporting a bill, a tax and regulatory bill that did not address driver impairment? Yes. And prevention, as well as some local control issues in terms of whether municipalities want to adopt, whether adopt the measure or reject it in their own communities. Would you prefer an opt out or an opt in? I would prefer an opt in. How do you define hard time so you have a hard time? Oh, hard time. Does that mean at least once? I will not. You can't? You will not. No. I mean, I think it's that important. There's no rush. And from my perspective, let's get it right. I mean, we can watch what others have done, learn from them, and do better. If you have municipalities opting out or opting out, either way, doesn't that create kind of this patchwork where you might be arrested for crossing a town line? Well, no. I'm talking about the retail sales. Yeah. No, not banning the utilization in their communities. But I think the community should have the opportunity to weigh in on whether they want to have retail sales. Sorry, I should have made that clear. Maybe you did. I'd help our small, long top general stores with it. And that's their choice. It may, but that's their choice. On the question of the mergers, whether to let some districts have a delay, how do you use them? I do believe, as I've said, that they need a little bit more time. We'll see where this goes on the House floor this afternoon. But I'm generally inclined to go along with that, that they should be given a little bit more time to conform.