 doing today is we're looking at S-47. We will take a few minutes of additional testimony. You want to testify, Brandon? I'm happy to go after Dan. I know he was on the agenda, so I understand. We're imposing so. Okay. All right. So, do you want to join us? And just for your information committee, make snorting noise as well. Dan is testifying because they're going to be live streaming his testimony. And I just want to warn you about that so that we are well behaved. We have 50,000 VPRIG members and supporters looking at you. Yeah. Yes. So, oh no, looking at you. None of them are at work, right? Well, they might look at it later. So, do you want to just introduce yourself? Yes. Yes. For the record, my name is Daniel Brown. I'm the government reform advocate with VPRIG. Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee for the opportunity to come testify in favor of S-47, an act which would limit campaign contributions from corporate entities. In general testimony before the committee earlier this session, VPRIG noted that we supported a ban on corporate contributions in the past, so it should come as no surprise that we're here offering strong support for S-47, which would ensure that contributions to a candidate or political party would come only from an individual, a political party, or a political committee. As you know, Vermont currently treats corporations in the same manner that it does human beings in terms of the contributions each is allowed to make, but corporations are not human beings and they should not be afforded the same opportunities to influence our elections here in Vermont. Corporations have certain advantages over human beings such as limited liability and unlimited life as a matter of public policy, but these advantages were intended to encourage the marketplace to flourish and they were not intended to result in undue influence over our political process. Admittedly, it is not just corporate money that corrupts our political process. Big money from individuals is certainly problematic as well, but while the Supreme Court has limited our options in terms of curtailing contributions from individuals, the court has repeatedly found that bans on direct corporate contributions to candidates and political parties stands on firm constitutional footing. I have included two articles, one from the Washington Post and one from the Boston Globe that reference ban on corporate campaign contributions standing up at the federal level and Massachusetts state ban also standing up. So S-47 is not the only solution we need to the problem of money in politics, but it is undoubtedly an essential ingredient. VPRED also supports public financing and creating incentives for more small-dollar contributions, but passing S-47 is a reasonable, if not groundbreaking, step that you can take right now to address the problem of money in politics. So VPRED urges you to support and pass S-47. Thank you and we didn't know but the elegant way that it was cracked so that we didn't have to try to define what a corporation was and when they were a corporation and when they weren't. But that was our legislative counsel that's a very eloquent move. It was. Thank you. Any questions for Dan? You understand that. My understanding is that corporations could still give money to pass. Yes, but they would be limited to the same, they'd be limited to Vermont half limit. So I believe that's four thousand dollars adjusted for inflation. Thank you. Thank you. For the record we're in a bathroom and we're director of party operations at the Vermont Democratic Party. So we are here. We know this came through as S-120 last year. And unfortunately we did not testify at the time. We had a chance to provide input and testimony on the House side. And so a lot of what I'm sharing today is what was shared with the House a year ago or a little under a year ago. So you know in general I think we can all agree that Citizens United, the Citizens United ruling in 2010 reshaped the political landscape for everybody. Dark money and corporate interests in our politics has only expired since then. And the Vermont Democratic Party at its core believes in the effort to eliminate corporate influence in elections and in governance. We're just not certain that this bill is going to address that in the best way. So eliminating corporate contributions to candidates and to political parties into Pax and St. Vermont, or just to parties into candidates, you know, is not going to eliminate those dollars from the political sphere. That money is still going to free flow through independent expenditures at the federal level. We've seen them here and they always come in late and with very, very little transparency about who is funding who is funding independent expenditures for gubernatorial candidates, mailers attacking or promoting individual legislative candidates. We see that happen all the time. Beyond that we're we're interested in supporting and working with with this committee and the House Committee on Government Operations to find a way to craft a bill that is not just going to be passable through both chambers and would be signed by the governor, but also would stand the test of the courts. We don't agree that this is a sure thing once it makes its way through the courts. There is case history to support the notion that a ban, a specific ban on contributions from a from a sorted class of donors to a political party would likely be struck down. The Second Court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2010, I believe, in favor of the Green Party of Connecticut v Garfield. At the time the lawsuit alleged that that the state's initially passed ban on lobbyist contributions to political parties and to candidates was was not constitutional. The court found that because there was a degree of separation between decision makers and and the contributors that that a ban between candidates certainly made sense and I believe they upheld that ban. A ban between between lobbyists and political parties was not upheld and was struck down. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, everyone here in the host I would imagine, is the one who deals with our federal court issues when it reaches the appellate level. We certainly see the possibility of corporate contributions between individual candidates or elected officials and corporations as both being something that makes sense and also something that would likely stand the test of the courts. A ban between any non decision making individual or potential decision making individual would likely not stand the test given that history and so I'm happy to answer any questions. That was struck down in Connecticut did you say? It was the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. It was the Green Party of Connecticut v Garfield in the year 2010. I'm going to double check on the year yes 2010 and I'm more than happy to email this committee that that case file. And so do you have language for us to look at or you're just proposing that we only deal with the ban between corporations and candidates? I think that frankly I think that the given the uncertainty that that a ban between political parties and and the language that's been crafted in this bill the the potential for that to either be completely struck down by the courts or the entirety of the law itself being struck down by the courts is is risk enough that that it might be worth just limiting the scope of this bill to donations or contributions received by individual candidates. Your proposal is just limiting the scope. Correct. We've done I believe as much as we can roamed at EPs and I don't want us to independent expenditure part committees. It's the citizens united decision and the citizens united decision had nothing to do with corporate donations. It only addressed those independent expenditure committees. So we we get to we shouldn't mix them up because we can't control them. We've done as much as we can in the state of Vermont to control them where we can. Well I think sorry well that's sort of why I was wondering if you had language on additional language. Well and I think that the I think that you know there there there is nothing that you can control that you can use to further control independent expenditures in Vermont. I think our concern is that passing passing this law would only take the corporate donations that are already being reported either to individual candidates or to political parties and they're required to be reported and itemized and all of that the same way that that any contribution is in the state of Vermont. Moving that money from one place to another is all that this would be doing. You basically take corporate money that is being spent on elections and donated either to individual candidates or to political parties and report it as such. Those corporations are still going to spend that money on elections. It's just a question of where they're going to spend it. Are they going to spend it with an entity that they have to report or are they going to spend it with an entity that they don't have to report and has no you know you have no authority over determining what their what their final requirements are. Well we do have final requirements for this and we do have we can't limit the amount of money that's given to an individual to an IEC from I call them IEPs because it's independent education plans because I think they're so dumb but the we can't we can't limit the amount that an individual can contribute to them but we can say that they have to disclose who's giving that amount and where the it's coming from and they have to report. And do we do that currently? Yes. With a with a PAC that is that is making expenditures in Vermont with a PAC that's registered or a super PAC that's registered with the FEC all they would really be required to do is file a mass media report stating what they are what their activity is doing for mass media activities and that's and I think that's I think that's the distinction is is removed you know corporations could still and will still give to PACs based on the language in this bill but they're they're they're a lot of a lot of what they do and especially if they they don't feel they can give to a political party or to a candidate directly they'll just give more on the independent expenditure side with regulated by the FEC or frankly not regulated by the FEC. So anybody will all the time I work around for anything we do. Now is there any other question? Well I am because I wish I understood the independent expenditure scene a little bit. Me too. It's entities PACs that make the right independently spend money on a TV ad or on a without any contact with the candidate. Right with no contact with no coordination with the candidate. No well it's different but it's not contact. I mean they but no coordination but what do we and right now we require that they disclose their source the source of 10 days before the election. Betsy will answer that for us because Betsy will know exactly what it is. I was looking here to find out how we do it but yes we do. Do you want to answer that directly right now? Yeah. We'll send in director of elections for the record. Betsy correct me if I'm wrong the only distinction in our law in terms of independent expenditure tax is that the limits don't apply to them. Right sorry limit what? The limits the contribution limits do not apply. They're under all the same reporting and disclosure requirements for the standard tax. Must disclose and everything. So PACs have disclosed clearly contributors are the same way everybody on the front. And why but we could is it that we're not able to put a contribution. Yes correct. By citizens to unite. That is Atlantic right. I mean the courts have said you can't do that. Okay. So we've done what we can do around them. But but I take I um does anybody else want to weigh in on this issue and then I'm going to ask Betsy to to give us some information about the the courts and where she thinks that is. But this is just I don't know. Josh Massey sorry the director of the Vermont Democratic Party. Is it you know we're not here to take a position we do think getting big money out of politics is is the right thing to do. We just want to make sure that it's transparent as possible and the Vermont Democratic Party takes a very very small amount of corporate money. It's not not something that we're self-interested in protecting. We just want to make sure it's transparent. Yeah and that's and that's the that's the important piece is that it you know this is you know we're not here because we're we're we're so desperate for for corporate cash that this bill would derail us. I mean we corporate money accounted for less than six percent of what we actually took in last year and and that's that's counting you know LLC money from people who are attorneys here in Vermont. You know it's it's not you know it's this isn't a this isn't a we really want to keep this money conversation. It's a we're we're idealist too. We would really like to to do everything we can to get big money out of politics. We're just not certain that this bill as it's written right now is is is both going to achieve that goal and not just pass through the Vermont legislative procedure but also make it through the through the judicial process embedding. The problem is the only thing that's certain about campaign finance reforms is that but I'm certain you know we actually you know we seem like the way of what we try to do certain contributors try to find ways around it and you at one point said if you'd like to come up with a better idea of a there may not be a better idea right now. A better idea from you you're saying this and not allow them to not prohibit their contributions to parties. I'm not saying that I don't think that's a better idea. I'm not sure what a better idea is I may not be willing to admit that but I think this is a step in the right direction. So Brandon and Will do you have a notion of how much independent expenditure money was spent? Wait a minute let's we're not talking about independent expenditure money here. Okay. I mean I don't want us to derail on that because that is hasn't that isn't the focus of this bill this bill doesn't do anything about that at all. So then I would use my question say to Brandon you have referred to better language that you're not happy with where we are and but we we would need be wanting to get this bill out into the house. Do you have better language that you'd like to propose or have us consider? I think simply focusing the scope of the the bill on political candidates would likely deal with deal with the issues eliminating political parties and as you as you've done with PACS from from this version of the bill from here to last year it's it's I think just the cleanest way to to get this through and and that that would be the only change I think we would propose. Okay so I'd like to hear from Betsy about the she is our attorney and just to remind people that we had what we thought and it was and Anthony was actually following the most progressive and the hardest campaign finance law in the country and it was struck down in 2006. It took us from 2006 until when Betsy did we pass the first it was was it 2014? 2014 so it took us eight years to come to any kind of a an agreement even among 180 legislators that we could pass something so it just anything we do is as Anthony said is uncertain. So Betsy would you like to have a good afternoon for the records at CNRS Legislative Council here on S-47 as you know S-47 is essentially a rerun of S-120 that the Senate passed last when the Senate was considering S-120 and I think maybe also in the house was considering it after you passed it over there. I created a handout providing an overview of campaign finance law I've emailed it to all of you it has hyperlinks in it but Gail has also requested copies be delivered here so you might see someone show up with some paper copies though but I'm going to just go over some of the provisions in the handout and maybe it will help you to turn back to it later when you're discussing this bill and it helps explain when to do that because we can try and I can look on here. Awesome just a few minutes. That's just different for your committee and I make it a little crazy so I'm like they're partying in there so it's great though. So the handout talks here oh excellent okay so the handout talks about how important it is for people to be able to participate in our electoral process because elections are the foundation of our whole government right because we're a representative democracy so when you go onto the first page of the handout it talks about some of the court quotes on the importance of the ability to participate in campaigns but it generally describes how there is a distinction between independent expenditures which is money spent not in coordination with candidates and those are persons own speech and that cannot be limited independent expenditures cannot be limited but contributions are different contributions are either your money that's given directly to a candidate pack or party or there's some coordination when the money is spent so that it was meant or designed to be coordinated with a candidate to help a candidate or a group of candidates so first in this handout if you want to take a look at it starting at the bottom of page one it starts talking about independent expenditures and how that's protected first amendment speech poor Luca sorry what do you guys think about yourself I need you to pick something up from Dave I'll bring it back here thank you Gail thanks I'll just keep going because you'll have this we have excellent so independent expenditures so that's money spent to influence an election that's not coordinated with the candidate that is considered first amendment protected speech and a court applies the highest standard review called strict scrutiny and so far the courts have said under the standard review of strict scrutiny the independent expenditures cannot be limited regardless of who is speaking whether it's an individual or whether it's some non-human entity now federal law we talked about it before because federal law does have prohibitions on corporations making contributions similar to what's in your s47 but in fact federal law used to not only prohibit corporate contributions it used to prohibit corporate independent expenditures it used to require corporations to form a pact in order for them to make independent expenditures and now i'm on page two of the top so federal law used to prohibit corporations and labor unions for making either independent expenditures or contributions without first establishing a separate segregated fund which is a pact and in a precursor to citizens united the u.s supreme court struck down the requirement that certain types of corporations form a pact in order to make independent expenditures because they said pacts are burdensome alternatives for these people to speak people corporate people to speak later in citizens united the supreme court said that pacts are burdensome alternatives and the fact that any corporation has to create a separate segregated fund pact in order to make independent expenditures creates a prior restraint on their speech in fact they had to form a pact before they can speak in regards to an election and the court said political speech does not lose its first amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation corporations and other associations like individuals contribute to the discussion debate and dissemination of information ideas that the first amendment seeks to foster that's law that citizens united it's u.s supreme court law we have to comply with it so the effect of that was you cannot require corporations to form pacts in order for them to make independent expenditures it's too burdensome let the corporations speak itself so then as a result of that citizens united case in 2010 there was a dc district court case called speech now that basically said well since corporations uh since their speech can't be limited contributions to to pacts and make only independent expenditures also can't be limited because there's no there's no potential corruption there if you're only if a group is only going to make independent expenditures you can't limit contributions to that group and that is the origin of what we now call super pacts or independent expenditure only pacts out of pacts and we have a definition of i.e. only pacts in our campaign finance law and i've provided it at the bottom of page two but in that case what we've been talking about so far is speech independent speech it's not coordinated with a candidate contributions are different contributions the court have said can be limited i'm at the top of page three thank you thank you thank you direct your elections i want to come to him okay it's online too well so if you want to turn to page three that's where we're all right now we're talking about contributions and that's what s 47 talks about only s 47 is only about contributions not independent expenditures so the courts have said by contrast with a limit on independent expenditures a limit on the amount any one person or group may contribute to a candidate or a pack entails only a marginal restriction on their ability to engage in free communication it's symbolic and the court has said there's a lesser burden that they have to show there that the state would have to show if they want to regulate contributions they said the government can regulate contributions to prevent corruption or its appearance and the contribution limit is closely drawn it's permissible if it doesn't undermine a material degree of political discussion what's have said a contribution limit is unconstitutional unconstitutional if it prohibits candidates and pacts from amassing resources necessary for effective advocacy that's from our own u.s. Supreme Court case Randall v syrup which challenged her old campaign finance law and when a court looks at whether contribution limits are too low they'll look at the infringement on the person's symbolic support balance against first amendment rights not impacted such as their freedom to discuss candidates and issues and i've just provided here why are 1997 campaign finance law was struck down but let's move on i provided the bottom page three just how our court our supermont supreme court has upheld a complete contribution ban as you know there's a ban on lobbyist contributions to legislators during the session and i've also provided a few other links that you might find helpful as you discuss campaign finance generally on page four i provided under the section called contribution limits a link to ncsl's table on other states limits on contributions and that table will show you what other states do in regard to corporate and labor union contribution provisions and limits if you're interested but s47 is specifically talking about non-human contributions so let's turn on page four to section seven and this is in regard to the government's ability to regulate contributions so there's a 2003 u.s supreme court case called fecd bowman and it upheld the federal law requirement for these issue advocacy nonprofits to form a pact in order for them to make a contribution and the court stated in part that contributions enjoy the benefits of state laws such as limited liability perpetual life and favorable treatment of the accumulation and distribution assets which present the potential for distorting the political process and specifically the court said that congressional judgment in the area of corporate contributions warrants considerable deference and reflects a permissible assessment of the dangers proposed by corporations to the electoral process and the court said there is still a hard line between speech and association and the latter may be limited so after citizens united there was a second circuit court case that's our federal court court of appeals in which vermont is a part of it was called agnabene park it discussed that bowman is still good law and its application to contributions and reiterated that citizens united only applies to corporate independent expenditures still maintaining that line between the inability for government to regulate corporate pure speech and the ability to regulate corporate contributions at the bottom of page four a connecticut was discussed and i am familiar with the green party case i'll go back and look to it but i believe that the green party case was about prohibiting lobbyists or contractors to make contributions i don't believe it specifically addressed corporations but i'm happy to go back and reread that case i don't know how many times i've read it but i will go back and i will review that case and i can get back to you on it but for example i provided the bottom of page four what connecticut actually does and if you follow that link to the connecticut general statutes it will take you to their prohibitions on corporations making contributions in the state of connecticut in fact connecticut requires corporations to establish PACs and i've also provided here the information that they go a step further and say a business entity is prohibited from make from establishing more than one PAC is it talked about here remember yeah um could a corporation just go out and start making all these PACs so they can make multiple contributions well connecticut addresses addresses that and they're good saying business entity cannot establish more than one PAC i'd like to interrupt your train of thought but that as far as you know is not the channels as far as i know yes at this point that's a that's a good addition at the top of page five um i provided what federal law currently provides for prohibitions on corporate contributions and labor union contributions so under federal law corporations and labor unions are prohibited for making contributions in federal elections they are prohibited if they want to make a contribution a corporation or a labor union can establish a separate segregated fund for political purposes a separate segregated fund is a PAC and they actually place limits on how they can solicit funds to those PACs they're only able to solicit funds from individuals associated with the corporation or a labor union for example their stockholders or members in their families and other specified individuals a separate segregated fund is a PAC so big picture corporations aren't under federal law aren't even allowed to make a contribution to a PAC like s47 would but corporations can establish one of these PACs using their own funds to at least get it started not to make a actual contribution to it so so under s47 the corporation could give a PAC to any convicted money to any PAC at once under what the federal law they have to establish their own PAC correct yeah so they can't a corporation can establish only one PAC they can't establish more than one PAC but could they give could there could they give to more than one PAC I mean they they establish one PAC and then their their neighbor down the street establishes a PAC because they're they agree with each other and so they contribute back and forth but under federal it could only be their individuals associated with them anyway so it isn't the corporation giving right so under federal law there overall prohibited for making any contributions corporations the corporation itself correct but they can establish these yeah their own PACs yeah okay yeah whereas under s47 it's a little looser and that a corporation could still be considered a single source and give a direct contribution to a PAC but it would have to be under your current PAC limits right the contribution limits yes yeah um also just to note under federal law the name of a corporate or labor union separate segregated fund has to include the name of its connected organization just so you know if it's uh bryan's corporation it would have to be named bryan's corporation path or something similar we're going to make you couldn't have taxes for modders for happy families correct correct all right so that's a big picture of the lay of land right now under federal law and some examples from other states on what is permissible big picture there it is permissible to put restrictions on the ability of corporations to make contributions specifically can i guarantee that s47 would be upheld absolutely not i'm an attorney in the legislative branch only the judicial branch can render or adjudicate constitutional decisions but i'm just telling you what i'm aware of for the current state of the law but i can never make it a guarantee whether this would be upheld and the judiciary won't weigh in and they won't weigh in right because we don't have a lot of that many times right so i have other information in here but we've just reviewed what's really at the heart of s47 so what else can i tell you madam chair well since you counted sure it does anybody else have any questions for betsey no i just i don't think i have any particular questions i mean i want to talk more about bill in general but i don't have questions okay no i i think that your testimony betsey and raises some interesting things we might consider adding to this bill limiting how many uh businesses can have many packs of business could form interesting plot and to be clear under this i know we said this before but we get confused sometimes we're talking about amongst ourselves under the the bill also corporations could only give money to packs correct not to parties and not to people that's correct and candidates right i said people yeah okay and she's going to double check with that green the green party uh case to see if we might consider taking out the as a result if we were worried about a challenge taking out the contribution to a party we were talking about this yesterday when you weren't here let's see just be clear that this has no impact on somebody running for congress that's right because federal law controls can't get any finance on the federal level thank you and that was that corporations are currently prohibited from contributing directly at the federal level and uh candidate for congress cannot accept federal unless they have to be an LLC that's incorporated on friday and they wear blue socks instead of red the the guidelines for the it i mean i said before they're 134 pages long because i looked them up when we were doing this before so i would like us to consider this prohibition of business entities is actually more than one pack yeah we use those words necessarily but i would like to consider because the one criticism no not the one but they did you want that post no actually it's annoying but it's some way it's just it's a rare thing it's wrecking so anyway well one of the criticisms or concerns me here often what this kind of bill is that well the corporations this group starts at packs so we could prohibit us from doing it like they would have to apply to not just corporations in my mind it would have to apply to anybody that wasn't an individual i mean it would have to apply the labor unions and everybody so you couldn't have the vsea have three packs or the afl cio have three different packs it would be any entity that was not an individual yeah how does what's in here now relate to unions well they can't get to individuals qualifies corporations they're not an individual it doesn't the same rule that class corporations correct correct because this does not ban corporations from giving it just says that only individuals and packs and parties can give to candidates and parties that's all it says it doesn't say a word about corporations at all but it does have a fact what little bit yes but i'm saying that it doesn't it doesn't mention corporations so it isn't banning corporate donations it's limiting if you happen i'm sorry yeah go ahead if you happen to be a corporation you can still give to a pack yes because you're on you're on that because you're an entity you're a single source yeah yeah but yes but we do so do we um we had thought we might vote on this today but do we want to put it off and have more discussion on um whether we want to address the issue of the number of whether or not corporation or entities can only form one pack of their own and can they donate to other packs i don't know if we can limit but we need a little more research on that and there was one other idea that came up it's a great party well i just like to hear more about the great party and just to to clarify you know that Betsy can check on this for you the that case does not deal with corporate contributions specifically but it looks at a ban between lobbyists and contractors and the the law as it was passed was between candidates and political parties the ban between the contributors and the the candidates was upheld political parties was struck down right and it's a similar principle where again the degree of separation you you can make the case that that somebody accepting a corporate contribution could be influenced by that contributor and that may affect their decision-making ability or or having to go political parties don't don't crack legislation we don't we don't write laws we i'm i'm i'm just going to say that that i'm looking you're not at the table yeah and the discussion that happens is i mean protestified and we generally until we're doing markup and we ask people for their comments on a particular area we don't have other people shut up yeah yes no we don't use shut up he did so what what would you like to do committee do you want to put this off until next week and get more information and see is there a step farther that we can take and what would them mean and i think if we could put it off maybe sorry it's not defensive but if we get back to us by tuesday i mean i wouldn't mind putting it off at least until tuesday i won't put it off i've never really put it off a long time i think most of us know how we're going to vote and how it's going to turn out but i would think if we could just well chris is guessing right yeah so i would love to have chris white be a we have we have it potentially on here for tuesday afternoon and we put it on there because we're dealing with a lot of things that affect the secretary of state on tuesday we're going to look at the no obr notaries issue we're going to review kind of miscellaneous elections issues that have come up the the bill isn't completely drafted yet because somebody somebody asked for too many bills to be drafted so there's a move and but we'll just have a list of we could start talking about the list of suggestions and then we're going to talk about we're going to have a walkthrough s 78 which is the relating to lobbying and reporting dates and just for point of information uh tuesday i'm going to be down the hall between one thirty and two o'clock of course so okay well we'll the it will take this up after okay that's the vote okay no and as you know i'll probably be here about two thirty right okay i've been asked to go across the hall at one the senate is the two well does somebody want to sit to these chairs at one thirty with me i'll be here by one third okay all right okay so we'll do that if anybody has any other ideas that they might want to attach to this bill thank you dan we're sorry that we but you might be happy or in the end thank you okay all right okay so that thank you thank you thank you thank you we have to do with this afternoon so i apologize for being late here are you artificial intelligence i'm artificial yes and intelligent i don't know about that that's not for debate no we think you are or i do anyway well i think that's a comment about you about me so i just wanted before we get started i just want to point out the um the blackboard here the bottom part everybody's seen the top our own senator hallmark was inducted into the broadcaster's hall of fame and the principal's referee hall of fame oh congratulations thank you two different halls of fame at the same time well it's a double hall of famer yeah last year i think you should be wearing orange strikes today i'll be wearing it all weekend yeah did you get fit last night yes not last night recently yeah it's just beginning to show it's interesting that much is it hope you took the guy out of the game gosh not was this fault like you got all the way all right so are you um brian yes oh good come on enjoy this yeah see with the hot scene all right so i take it you have not been to testify to committee before never okay so we'll i'll just tell you the way we do this kind of everything is recorded um so you probably don't want to say anything you want not your mom to hear if she happens to ask for the cd and it's publicly available because these open meetings are open and so for people who can't come here really recorded we'll introduce ourselves and then you can take it away and just identify yourself for the record so i'm brian oh sorry go ahead brian colo more from the ruttland district allison clarkson winter county district janette white windham district and our chair and um we have a sick member who's left rather than infect you from adison county so um take it away okay uh well uh brian brezland i asked to uh i i know where i asked you a couple questions the reason we're sitting down here primarily is um requesting additional meetings for the task force part of the part of the act was i think 10 meetings total i was told that brian sina was a representative um that at the time one at one point in time uh the 10 meetings were associated with compensation and now there's no compensation for the act so i was wondering if in that regard if we could amend the act to have additional meetings so guys i need a little bit of background yes so you you you work for the committee yes who do you work for oh um sorry she about some context sorry uh i work for a primary consulting uh from dboying king i was selected a part of the task force um from the vermont society of engineers for the artificial intelligence of the 14 member group right it was brian sina's uh uh bill last year so what are you supposed to be doing we're supposed to be studying artificial intelligence uh and then providing the senate power or the state state um with ultimately a report on recommendations um that the state could implement with our foreign officials i'm sure i'm missing a couple couple tidbits here and there but that's generally what we're tasked with doing i'm sorry it's just one more curious thing i mean what how did you come about doing this what do you do that as artificial i'm really a layman in terms of artificial intelligence again one of the part of the act was to get a task force member um from the vermont society of engineers i'm a civil engineer i really do not deal with artificial intelligence on a daily basis and this this whole process i guess is new to me and um it's a learning experience that's just like all the rest of us here we deal with a whole lot of issues that we don't necessarily know a whole lot about i think one of the things that we really wanted to know was how how we often let technology get ahead of us in and then and then we try to catch up by writing policies and procedures and stuff to to try to catch up and we're often so far behind that we it controls us rather than we controlling it and one of the goals i think was to see how how was there a role for the state in regulating in any way and and and also applying to our own procedures so i think that that was the the artificial intelligence community out there is often running they're doing whatever they're doing but how how does it relate to the state and how can we brian so you've already had 10 meetings we have we've had five meetings oh five okay with the five remaining we're trying to figure out how to engage the public and also organize a final report and all 14 have been at each meeting uh no i at least the majority are for l seven more likely 10 10 12 and the time limit that we gave you was a year i believe it may be nine months i think we started around six or five meetings left sort of one per one per month or so i believe the final report is due in june that is another request that the task force is asking for would be an extension to that so i'd like to know when you want the extension to and what progress have you made to date okay uh we the task force was thinking about september so the seven nine months task force being together would be a year you have an interim report did you uh yes that's that's due on the 15th i i said it to gail okay yes i did okay that was great this this is not finalized we know that okay but we actually just for your information when you do finalize the report we do it we'd like reports that look like that instead of ones with glossy covers that cost a lot to produce okay uh would you like or we were asking about the progress of the task force Chris do you want to join would it be helpful if the two of you as co-chairs i think he he will cover it perfectly well but if there's a question on okay here they i sit there enough don't i thank you okay and there's been five meetings so far one of the the first initial meeting really we didn't we didn't do too much just a mean greet and how are we going to provide the the product that the state requires at the first meeting chris and i was selected as co-chairs from there the second meeting was scheduled that's when we started really formulating who we're gonna how are we're gonna how who what why where when now so to speak we started looking at risks opportunities liabilities things of that nature one of the i believe one of the in the in the act was trying to see speak with different industries across industry ai crossing the entire industries of ramon in that regard we tried summarizing different industries in ramon and from there we we decided we were going to try to speak to one one speaker in each industry from there the point would be the last three meetings and we've in each of those three meetings we've tried to categorize industries that are similar in nature for example medical healthcare and then insurance technology manufacturing construction labor as industries so i believe at the third meeting we did we looked at we asked speakers from the agricultural and natural resources community most most presenters were from uvm they talked again they talked about you know different aspects of artificial intelligence in in their field the fourth meeting was held in december that was on 14 14th i believe 14th of december that meeting was on transportation and manufacturing instruction and labor speakers were from the consulting industry of engineering one of the task force members i believe spoke joe sagali from the artificial uh from the autonomous vehicle aspect from the construction industry a contractor from you know roads roads bridges that that type of instruction was brought in and i know this he spoke on his personal use of artificial intelligence and then finally there was a fifth meeting on january 18th where we spoke to the healthcare industry and medical devices industry most people from uvm i believe there was a southwestern regional medical center speaker as well talking about you know the the lack of artificial intelligence in their industry or what they're doing doing the artificial intelligence currently that so that has been the five meetings thus far we're we're planning on the next few meetings to engage the public get their opinion and input on the matter of artificial intelligence and just see what their input is and then i guess the you know these last five remaining meetings would be trying to provide the state with the final report so can you give us just tell us stories of some of the ways we're most successfully seeing artificial intelligence applied because we see it in our daily lives and we don't all recognize it okay i can give examples and then i guess my question is it sounds like you're asking us to exempt the public hearings from being included as part of your meetings and to me that's what you're hope it sounds like you're asking is that you'd like to have five remaining meetings but maybe independent of the public meetings uh i i guess yes that the public means you listen you're not i want jill to test i i guess yes i have a different view than you do jill charbonneau of german state labor council at lco as i understand it we have two we have we're doing judicial and criminal justice so next meeting 22nd and then we'll be doing retail how it impacts retail workers but we also want to do a series of meetings that goes out to the public right and hold public forums but we don't feel we can get that done by June 30th and that's the reason for the extension yeah well we can we'll talk much better some but i'd love to yeah just hear hear about how you have experienced a i apply to give us the notion of how it's successfully being okay i can give us several examples from again from the speakers that i've heard of the construction industry we heard from eci they are they actually have a labor shortage or think they cannot find the amount of staff to fulfill the job their job requirements so they are actually using they consider it artificial intelligence software programs to better place resources then staff members machinery equipment across varying jobs across the state joe joe joe sagali in the terms of transportation spoke on autonomous vehicles what's what's there currently and then what's going what's going to happen in the future at that same meeting i forget the guy i forget the gentleman's name but he he actually drove drove to this to the presentation in a tesla and basically he said all you got to do was hold on to the steering wheel and the car drove for him it was able to detect the centerline and white edge lines of the road joe joe mentioned it's it could be anywhere from 10 years to 40 years before we're starting to see autonomous vehicles but that's open up to open to interpretation at the agricultural and natural resources meeting i forget the gentleman's name but he ran a dairy farm or dairy product dairy for milking cows he sells this machine that melts cows on its own and okay and it's completely hands-off and the the the machine knows when to let cows in or out to maximize milking basically and it's basically it learns about their their feed patterns and other aspects of you know the cows nutrition and how many times a day does it melt the cow or how many times it'll let it into the part the parlor basically so that was that was kind of interesting for the medical healthcare insurance we were dealing with two two presenters spoke on cancer treatments are detecting cancer cells artificially you know computer software programs are able to instead of having the human eye look at the cells have a computer look at the cells and look for abnormalities and deficient irregularities in the cells of tech cancer eventually a part of the intelligence that's more intelligent than maybe nothing just don't know one of the one of the topics during that the same discussion was the liability of a computer recognizing a cancer versus a second opinion of the of the part of a doctor or you know the what what is the liability associated with taking the computer's interpretation versus persons so i wanted to add also for a speaker who did a study i believe at harvard about using instagram to protect people who might have etsd and or depression that there is an ability from how they present themselves to discover whether they might need treatment and that that was an application he was very interested in helping people we also heard from a person from the southwest medical center who started just using i think it's like a windows program from microsoft and gathering information and streamlining there some of their processes in the hospital himself just and finding how well it worked and how the the program could detect who was entering the data just by you know their their choice of words so on and so forth so people are out there you know playing around using the stuff themselves without necessarily you know a big program behind them and the fellow drove in the to the meeting in the tesla is also the head person at global foundries for developing artificial intelligence is very a lot of discussion about how does it apply and how do we use it i've heard just with the car since the other side i've heard a few from who but somebody who knew what they were talking about that the autonomous vehicles are going to have a harder time navigating dirt roads yes because they use the lines when there's snow and there's light snow they're not going to know where to go the lines they use the lines painted on the road right anytime the lines are obscured they have to know a lot of lines chris is going to love this one i hate that i heard this yesterday how you can tell a drug driver in roman yes they drive pretty solid straight because they don't want people to think they're weaving they hit every pie holder the non-drunk driver we have to avoid the pie holders to remember that um so i i don't want to i want to keep hearing a little more about this but i'm going to just throw out a suggestion right now for us to consider so that you don't have to wonder if we're going to ever address your request um that we suggest giving you till january of 2020 that would be a year from now to come up with a report that we give you um maybe five or six more meetings you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to have more than because you have five left anyway right so between now and next january you wouldn't be able to and that you not um that the that if you hold like four public hearings that they not count as your meetings right because so you would have you would in effect have like five more meetings left and then another um four or five meetings because you're going to have two the way i look heard you say you're going to have two more fact finding meetings i mean purely talking to people and then you're going to have public hearings and then you're going to need i would think maybe four meetings to start talking about how do how do we how does this impact the state is there any role for the state to play here not not only how can we use it in our own processes but is there is there any segment of this that should be regulated how to how are we as a state going to respond to that's just going to be my my suggestion for right now and you can yeah i just wanted to us to get there before i'd ask i would support that and accept like three public meetings yeah whatever yeah i'm fine i'm just trying to get a handle so if there's 14 you all get per diems and mileage for each meeting no no you don't we get squat we just come because some of us this day yeah okay some of us are not we're not talking about thousands of dollars dollars there's just uh brought in uh jean is the only legislator that would cost us money everybody else's pay i i i'd like to mention i believe kala is compensated for her time oh and kala has a normal level of compensation it will break us but kala is your hidden secret do you always be at the same spot so far yes at national life i believe the building uh the room numbers have changed but okay national life plans will we go public to actually go around the state good yeah good for you i'd love to have you answer can i second the chair's motion then i think it's great yeah i would agree just to figure out whether it's three or four public hearings and then five meetings in addition good make a suggestion is there any reason we wouldn't limit the number of public hearings no i don't care you could have 20 that's my point so really we're talking about the number of meetings that we can have under the under your authority your own authority yeah i mean i i mean if you want to have more public meetings we have to better as far as right yeah but we want to make sure you still have enough substantive time to talk and yeah right in addition to the meetings if we don't wait for only limits and limit on our the actual meetings the public meetings are just great yeah yeah but they aren't always just gravy they're often included in our but we're not we're excluding public meetings from that was my idea i like it i think it's a good idea i for once and with you i wouldn't have time to be talking about it just easy so that would be now what i'm not bad i'm charmed because i'm not sure why we would want to report in june anyway we were not around right so if we put it till january 15th or something like that then there's time for us to react to the recommendations and for committees of jurisdiction to start looking at it does transfer agency of transportation i mean department of transportation what a committee of transportation do they have a role in here are they going to start having different regulations for uh self-driven cars or whatever you call them so that'll give us a chance to yeah the one thought i have actually is it we have a much shorter time frame next year for our bill introduction and well we're changing that we haven't yet so i mean we may change it but uh at the moment the senate has an earlier deadline and i believe it's in december yes so one thought might be that this report be due to set in december december if we wanted to affect that or we could do a committee bill anytime no we can't we can't do a committee bill anytime but we're changing that committee bills are in the senate have the same deadlines as regular as other bills but we are the rules committee was going to take that up today but we went too long on the floor because too many people okay but in lieu of that do you want to keep your january yeah okay i would keep the january 15th proposed deadline and we'll get special permission to introduce bills if we need to so just so i'm clear about this conversation completely complete their report by january 15th 2020 public meetings will be excluded from counting as i'm going to count okay and then our general meetings there's five remaining okay you can wait we'll add 10 i mean we'll add five zero 10 remaining okay brian so i don't want to necessarily pull on this but it's very fascinating to me um so you had some folks come in brian and jill and chris feel free to add and they are telling you about the ways in which their particular piece of industry or whatever they do getting affected by this did anyone have like bad stuff to say like we read somewhere i don't know where it was that one of the cars that supposedly could take care of itself ran over somebody in a crosswalk one step yeah did anyone have any negative sort of things to say i i guess speaking in broad generalities there's a lot of good things there's a lot of bad things what's coming one of which is perhaps labor reduction some some of what you know some of the some of these software programs can take away jobs by you know what what what the job the current person is doing sure what is capable of just for these programs um some of them may be good i mean i'm not sure a farmer really loves melting i mean some of them do probably but it's a chore at some level all right some of them think it's a good thing yeah in some regards we saw one at the farm show yeah if you went by it i've seen it i've seen a film of it well we had melting machines but those are different you had to slap them on and you had to yeah this one does it i think by itself it's all pretty crazy so so there are challenges on the other hand there are retail stores now that don't have any retail clerks that's exactly and you go to some fast food places and you order a kiosk so they have eliminated at least one position on the other hand all those programs had to be created by even being and so where one job is taken away often several are created innovation marches on and sadly have they had this task force in 1890 they would have been facing the same industrial revolution was you know in the 1840s 50s 60s i mean things evolve and i think are getting trying to get a handle on how it's going to evolve and one of the things we need to address to help our workforce deal with it and be prepared for it is in fact what why this is so valuable for us and not just our workforce but our i keep thinking that are there things out there that we need to create new regulations around that and i have no idea because to be quite honest with you this is so far above my head that when ryan came in and suggested this artificial task force um artificial intelligence task force i thought he was talking about replacing the legislature no no but i mean i i just this is not this is not my area at all so i i really need to have that the knowledge that you gain here put into into specific steps that i know how to i know how to implement if they if they need to be so that was us we've already we've already discussed them on the last several meetings about you know what kind of recommendations we could offer i guess they didn't have this time but we've we've already been discussing about what could be done potentially um again we would have i think that would come in the final report yeah i think i have no problem with it i'm excited definitely interesting do you know uh band mechanic yes you used to work for my company's boy king how do you know i am a good friend of his mother's and i his mother chris heart is my boss in my other life and so i kind of knew him when he was a little kid but sure he he i yeah again i know him but he he actually isn't the one who spoke uh joey apple didn't spoke yeah i just you said you're a friend of the boy king okay anything else sounds like you're doing good work yeah thank you and thanks for coming uh one thing i wanted to one final thing i wanted to ask was should should should this task force be keeping obviously brian sena is in the on the task force he's you know being aware should should the task force be corresponding with this this committee with for any regard about just on a regular basis sir well i think if you have questions if questions come up about where you might go or you think you need some kind of direction from us but i think you're you're a weak you the people that are on that task force are the people that we thought were entrusted to to deal with this issue so i don't think that's us so and if if um brian if there's something that he feels needs some kind of attention i'm sure he'll bring it to us so who drafted the original did betsey draft the original no i think was becky waserman because we have to remember now to do this yeah we have to draft the bill or do something to extend it yeah we will and it was i don't remember if was becky or do you know if it was becky or maria i don't know i can but i'll look it up yeah i i my guess is that or helena maybe i was thinking helena okay well we will have a a bill drafted about this maybe we could add it to the boards and commissions bill so we don't have to have a separate bill thanks thank you all right thanks wasn't too bad right but anytime you have any questions or anything feel free to contact us or and chris is here almost every day so gail or yeah gail or any of us yeah okay a lot we told him this was the scariest committee to testify did he tell you that i mixed it up obviously i think i'm wanting you to make a little more i thought we were so scary not at all thank you congratulations thank you very much really great good thanks i'll let my brother yeah that'd be great thank you are you no they're here i've been in the va b hall of the monoclete association for over a year last december you and jim jim ponson thank you welcome to brian hey take care thanks kala okay i love the work oh really only yeah yeah she came here she's staffing the committee very engaged i um must admit that it is so far beyond the camera right now she thinks we have to do with this afternoon so i i apologize for being late here are you artificial intelligence i'm artificial yes and intelligent i don't know about that that's not for debate no we think you are or i do anyway oh i think that's a comment about you have me so i just wanted before we get started i just want to point out the um the blackboard here the bottom part everybody's seeing the top our own senator palmer was inducted into the broadcasters hall of fame and the principal's referee hall of fame oh congratulations thank you two different halls of fame at the same time well one was double hall of famer yeah last year you should be wearing orange stripes today i'll be wearing it all weekend yeah did you get fit last night yes not last night on wednesday recently yeah it's just beginning to show it's interesting you took the guy out of the game gosh i wasn't as full as you got all the way all right so are you um brian yes oh good come on enjoy this yeah see with the hot seat all right so i take it you have not been to testify to the committee before but never okay so we'll i'll just tell you the way we do this kind of everything is recorded um so you probably don't want to say anything you want not your mom to hear if she happens to ask for the cd um and it's publicly available because these open meetings are open and so for people who can't come here really recorded we'll introduce ourselves and then you can take it away and just identify yourself for the record so i'm brian oh sorry go ahead brian collin weren't from the ruffin district allison parks and winter county district jenette white windham district and our chair and um we have a sick member who's left rather than infect you from adison county so um take it away okay uh well uh brian brosland uh to uh i had to hear where i asked you a couple questions the reason we're sitting down here requesting additional meetings for the task force part of the part of the act was i think 10 meetings total um i was told that brian the brian sena was a representative um that at the time one at one point in time the uh the 10 meetings were associated with compensation and now there's no compensation for the act so i was wondering if in that regard if you could um amend the act to have additional meetings so guys i needed a little bit of background yes so you you you work for the committee yes who do you work for oh um sorry do you have some context sorry uh i work for a private consulting uh from dboying king i was selected a part of the task force from the remand society of engineers for the artificial intelligence yes of the 14 member group right and he was brian sena's uh bill last year so what are you supposed to do we're supposed to be studying artificial intelligence uh and then providing the senate power in or the state state um with ultimately a report on recommendations um that the state could implement with our foreign official tons i'm sure i'm missing a couple couple tidbits here and there but that's generally what we're tasked with doing i'm sorry it's just one more curious thing i mean what how did you come about doing this what do you do that as artificial i'm really a layman in terms of artificial intelligence again one of the part of the act was to get a task force member um from the remand society of engineers i'm a civil engineer i really do not deal with artificial intelligence on a daily basis and this this whole process i guess is new to me and um it's a learning experience that's just like all the rest of us here we deal with a whole lot of issues that we don't necessarily know a whole lot about i think one of the things that we really wanted to know was how how we often let technology get ahead of us in and then and then we try to catch up by writing policies and procedures and stuff to try to catch up and we're often so far behind that we it controls us rather than we controlling it and one of the goals i think was to see how how was there a role for the state in regulating in any way and and and also applying to our own procedures so i think that that was the the artificial intelligence community out there is often running they're doing whatever they're doing but how how does it relate to the state and how can we brian so you've already had 10 meetings we have we've had five meetings oh five okay with the five remaining we're trying to figure out how to engage the public and also organize a final report and all 14 have been at each meeting no i at least the majority are informed about seven more likely 10 10 12 and the time limit that we gave you was a year i believe it may be nine months i think we started around two sort of five meetings left sort of one per one per month or so i believe the final report is due in june that is another request that the task force is asking for it would be an extension to that so i'd like to know when you want the extension to and what progress have you made to date okay uh we will the task force was thinking about september so instead of nine months task force being together would be a year you've had an interim report did you uh yes that's that's due on the 15th i sent it to gale okay did you bring reports yes i did okay that was great this this is not finalized we know that okay but we actually just for your information when you do finalize your report and do it we'd like reports that look like that instead of ones with glossy covers that cost a lot to produce okay we're asking about the progress of yeah because you wouldn't join would it be helpful if the two of you as co-chairs i think he he will cover it perfectly well but if there's a question i'm okay you're there i sit there enough don't thank you okay well uh and there's been five meetings so far one of the the first initial meeting really we didn't we didn't do too much just a mean greet and how are we going to provide the the product that the state requires at the first meeting chris and i was selected as co-chairs from there the second meeting was scheduled that's when we started really formulating who we're going to how are we going to how who what why where when now so to speak um we started looking at risks opportunities liabilities things of that nature one of the i believe one of the uh in the in the act was trying to see um speak with different industries across industry i across uh the entire industries of vermont in that regard we tried um summarizing different industries in vermont and um from there we we decided we were going to try to speak to one one speaker in each industry um from there um the development would be the last three meetings and um we've from those in each of those three meetings we've tried to categorize industries that are similar in nature um for example medical health care and then insurance um technology manufacturing construction labor as industries so i believe at the third meeting um we we looked at uh we asked speakers from the agricultural and natural resources community um what most most uh presenters were from uvm uh they talked about they talked about you know different aspects of artificial intelligence in in their field uh the fourth meeting was held in december that was on 14th i believe 14th of december that meeting was on transportation and manufacturing construction and labor speakers were from the consulting industry of engineering one of the task force members i believe spoke joe cigali from the artificial uh from the autonomous vehicle aspect in the construction industry um a contractor um from you know roads bridges that that that type of instruction was brought in um and i know these he spoke on his personal use of artificial intelligence um and then finally there was a fifth meeting um on january 18th where we spoke to uh the health care industry and medical devices industry um most people were from uvm but there was a southwestern regional medical center speaker as well talking about you know the the lack of artificial artificial intelligence in their industry or what they're doing with doing the artificial intelligence currently and that so that has been the five meetings thus far uh we're we're planning on the next few meetings uh to uh engage the public get their opinion input on the matter of artificial intelligence and just see what their input is and then i guess the you know these last five remaining meetings would be um trying to provide the statement of the final report so can you give us just tell us stories of some of the ways we're most successfully seeing artificial intelligence applied for them because we see it in our daily lives and we don't all recognize it okay i can give examples and then i guess my question is it sounds like you're asking us to exempt the public hearings from being included as part of your meetings to me that's what you're hope it sounds like you're asking is that you'd like to have five remaining meetings but independent of the public meetings uh i i guess yes that the public means you're just listening you're not i want to tell us here too she's on the test uh i guess yes so i have a different view than you do jill sharproom of roman state labor council aflcio as i understand that we have two we have we're doing judicial and criminal justice so next meeting the 22nd and then we'll be doing retail how it impacts retail workers but we also want to do a series of meetings that goes out to the public right and hold public forums but we don't feel we can get that done by June 30th and that's the reason for the extension yeah well we can we'll talk but you know some but i'd love to yeah just hear and hear about how you have experienced AI applied to people with the notion of how it's successfully being okay uh i can give us several examples again from the speakers that i've heard of the construction industry we heard from eci um they are they actually have a labor shortage or think they cannot find the amount of staff to fulfill the job their job requirements so they are actually using they consider it artificial intelligence software programs to better place resources the staff members machinery equipment across varying jobs across the state um joe joe joe sagali um in the terms of transportation spoke on autonomous vehicles what's what's there currently and then what's going on what's going to happen in the future um i'll have that same meeting um i forget the guy i forget the gentleman's name but he um he actually drove to this to the presentation in a tesla and uh basically he said all you had to do was hold on to the steering wheel and the car drove for him it was able to uh detect the center line and white edge lines of the road um joe joe mentioned uh it's it could be anywhere from you know 10 years to 40 years before we're starting to see autonomous vehicles but that's open up to open to interpretation um at the agricultural and natural resources uh meaning i forget the gentleman's name but he ran a dairy farm or dairy product dairy for milking cows he sells this uh machine that milks cows on its own and okay and uh it's completely hands off and the the the machine knows when to let cows in or out to maximize milking basically and it can it's basically it learns about their their feed patterns and um other aspects of you know the cow's nutrition and how many times a day does it melt the cow or how many times it'll let it into the the parlor basically um so uh that was that was kind of interesting um for the uh medical healthcare and insurance um we were dealing with uh two two presenters spoke on uh cancer treatments or detecting cancer cells artificial you know computer software programs are able to um instead of having the human eye look at the cells have a computer um look at the cells and look for abnormalities and um deficient uh you know irregularities in the cells of tech cancer we have artificial intelligence that's more intelligent than human intelligence well it's not they're just don't know one of the one of the their topics during that the same discussion was the liability of a computer recognizing a cancer versus a second opinion of the of the part of a doctor or you know the what what is the liability associated with taking the computer's um interpretation versus a person's so i wanted to add also for a speaker who did a study i believe in harvard about using instagram to detect people who might have epsd and or depression that there is an ability from how they present themselves to discover whether they might need treatment and that that was an application he was very interested in uh helping people we also heard from a person from the southwest medical center who started just using i think it's like a windows program from microsoft and gathering information and string lining there some of their processes in the hospital himself just and finding out how well it worked and how the the program could detect who was entering the data just by you know their their choice of words so on and so forth so people are out there you know playing around using the stuff themselves without necessarily uh you know a big program behind them and the fellow who drove in the to the meeting in the uh tesla is also the head person at global foundries for developing artificial intelligence is very uh a lot of discussion about how does it apply and how do we use it i've heard this with the cars this little side i've heard here from people somebody who knew what they were talking about that the autonomous vehicles are going to have a harder time navigating dirt roads yes because they use the lines when there's snow when there's light snow they're not going to know where to go the lines they use the lines painted right so anytime the lines are obscured they have difficult times a lot of lines it's um christ is good love this one i it's a i heard this yesterday how you can tell a drunk driver in roman yes they drive pretty solid and straight because they don't want people to think they're weaving they hit every pi holder the non-drunk driver weaves in and out to avoid the pi holders you remember that um so i i don't i don't want to um i want to keep hearing a little more about this but i'm going to just throw out a suggestion right now for us to consider so that you don't have to wonder if we're going to ever address your requests that we suggest giving you till january of 2020 that would be a year from now to come up with a report that we give you um maybe five or six more meetings you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to have more than because you have five left anyway right so between now and next january you wouldn't be able to and that you not um that the that if you hold like four public hearings that they not count as your meetings right because so you would have you would in effect have like five more meetings left and then another um four or five meetings so because you're going to have two the way i look heard you say you're going to have two more fact finding meetings and you're purely talking to people and then you're going to have public hearings and then you're going to need i would think maybe four meetings to start talking about how how do we how does this impact the state is there any role for the state to play here not not only how can we use it in our own processes but is there is there any segment of this that should be regulated how do how are we as a state going to respond to that's just going to be my my suggestion for right now and you can yeah i just wanted us to get there before i asked i would support right and exactly like three public meetings yeah whatever yeah i'm fine i'm just trying to get a handle so there's 14 you all get proteams and mileage for each meeting no no you don't we get squab we just come because some of us are stable yeah okay some of us are not so we're not talking about uh thousands of dollars there's just uh brian uh china is the only legislator that would cost us money everybody else i i i'd like to mention i believe uh kala is um compensated for her time oh and kala has a long level of compensation it will break us but kala is your hidden secret do you always meet at the same spot so far yes at national life i believe the building uh the room numbers have changed but okay national life we plan to what we go public to actually go around the state good yeah good for you i'd love to answer can i second the chair's motion then i think it's great yeah i i would agree just to figure out whether it's three or four public hearings and then five meetings in addition good make a suggestion is there any reason we wouldn't limit the number of public hearings no i don't hear you can have 20 that's my point so really we're talking about the number of meetings that we can have under the under your authority yeah i mean i i mean if you want to have more public meetings we have the batteries right yeah but we want to make sure you still have enough substantive time to talk and yeah right that's what i'm saying in addition to the meetings if we don't limit the volume limits yeah expand the limit on our the actual meetings the public meetings are just great yeah yeah but they aren't always just gravy they're often included in our but we're not we're excluding public meetings i know that was my idea i like it but i think it's a good idea i for once and with you i'm not sure why we would want to report in june anyway we were not around right so if we put it till january 15th or something like that then there's time for us to react to the recommendations and for committees of jurisdiction to start looking at this transfer agency of transportation i mean department of transportation what a committee of transportation do they have a role in here are they going to start having different regulations for uh self-driven cars or whatever you call them so that'll give us a chance to yeah the one thought i have actually is we have a much shorter time frame next year for our bill introduction and well we're changing that we haven't yet so i mean we may change it but uh at the moment the senate has an earlier deadline and i believe it's in december yes so one thought might be that this report be due to set in december december if we wanted to affect that or we could do a committee bill any time no we can't we can't do a committee bill any time but we're changing that committee bills are in the senate have the same deadlines as regular as other bills but we are the rules committee was going to take that up today but we went too long on the floor because too many people had to think but in lieu of that do you want to keep your January proposal okay i would keep the january 15th proposed deadline and we'll get special permission to introduce bills if we need to so just so i'm clear about this conversation completely complete their report by january 15th 2020 public meetings will be excluded from counting as our meetings okay and then our general meetings there's five remaining okay you can wait i mean we'll add five okay so i don't want to necessarily pull on this but it's very fascinating me um so you had some folks come in brine and jill and chris feel free to add and they are telling you about the ways in which their particular piece of industry or whatever they do are are getting affected by this did anyone have like bad stuff to say like we read somewhere i don't know where it was that one of the cars that supposedly could take care of itself ran over somebody in a crosswalk did anyone have any negative sort of things to say i i guess speaking in broad generalities there's a lot of good things there's a lot of bad things with what's coming um one of which is perhaps labor reduction um so some some of what you know some of the some of these software programs could take away jobs by you know but what what the job the current person is doing sure what is capable of just for these programs um some of them may be good i mean i'm not sure a farmer really loves milking i mean some of them do probably but it's a chore at some level right some of them think it's a good thing yeah in some regard we saw one at the farm show yeah if you went by it i've seen a film of it well we had milking machines but those are different you had to slap them on and you had to yeah this one does it i think by itself it's pretty crazy so so there are challenges on the other hand there are retail stores down that don't have any retail clerks that's exactly and it goes to some fast food places and you order a kiosk so they've eliminated at least one position on the other hand all those programs had to be created by human being and so where one job is taken away often several are created innovation marches on and sadly have they had this task force in 1890 they would have been facing the same industrial revolution was you know in the 1840 50 60s i mean it big evolve and i think are getting trying to get a handle on how it's going to evolve and what are the things we need to address to help our workforce deal with it and be prepared for it is in fact what why this is so valuable for us and not just our workforce but our i keep thinking that are there things out there that we need to create new regulations around that and i have no idea because to be quite honest with you this is so far above my head that when ryan came in and suggested this artificial task force um artificial intelligence task force um i thought he was talking about replacing the legislature no no but i mean i i just this is not this is not my area at all so i really need to have that the knowledge that you gain here put into into specific steps that i know how to i know how to implement if they if they need to be so we've already we've already discussed them on the last several meetings about you know what kind of recommendations we could offer as they need this time but we've already been discussing about what could be done potentially um again we would have i think that would come in the final report yeah i think i have no problem with i think it's exciting definitely interesting do you know uh band mechanic yes you used to work for my company's boy king how do you know i am a good friend of his mother's and i his mother chris heart is my boss in my other life and so i kind of knew him when he was a little kid but sure he he i i again i know him but he he actually isn't the one who spoke uh joey apple that he spoke yeah i just you said you're referring to boy king can i anything else sounds like you're doing good work yeah thank you and thanks for coming one thing i wanted to one final thing i want to ask was should should should this task force be keeping obviously brian sena is in the on the task force he's you know being aware should should the task force be corresponding with this this committee with for any regard about just on a regular basis or well i think if you have questions if questions come up about where you might go or you think you need some kind of direction from us but i think you're you're a weak you the people that are on that task force are the people that we thought were entrusted to to deal with this issue so i don't think that's us so and if if um brian if there's something that he feels needs some kind of attention i'm sure he'll bring it to us so who drafted the river did betsey draft the original no i think was becky wasserman because we have to remember now to do this yeah we have to draft the bill or do something to extend it yeah we will and it was i don't remember if was becky or um do you know if it was becky or aria i don't know i can't but i'll look it up yeah i my guess is that or helena maybe i was thinking helena okay well we'll we will have a a bill drafted about this so i have to say first of all i'm going to start by saying that we went uh i went to um michael trocken i went to a meeting in rowington we met with um rhino foods twin craft uh hotel vermont lake shemplain chocolates the university um yeah you were there with the university services the hospitals the hospitals the guy that runs the employment and it was really good and there were pretty exciting recommendations that came out of there some more helpful to the business community some helpful to the state and then some in terms of licensing and opr and then some i thought in terms of our own workforce how we can so given that i have to say i read this report i don't know who wrote this report but this was the best government report i've ever read that was going to start crying i i laughed i didn't weep i laughed and i said oh my god that is a trick how why did he say that that is so much fun which bottle of hair stuff do you want to use the one that you can read you don't have to reform something that hasn't been formed it's full of literary flourishes and and truly and i will tell you that uh same opinion comes from our pro camp well that is very very nice i appreciate it and we're always i mean really it's a privilege just to be able to write things and have them read well but some of them are pretty poorly written and dullly written so i want to say that the way i think we want to do this is to go to look at the report so we're all really familiar with it and then we have you on the schedule for next week to start talking about specific really getting into the details of what we can do that this committee can do there's things that other committees can do but how how do we fit into this whole um anyway you know what i mean so okay so okay um so well thank you for your kind words about the report i think we we were kind of privileged to be able to look at it from a from a distance that permitted kind of engagement thinking broadly about what we're talking about there's good and bad to that in that we're working at a very general level you know we talk about all occupational license and professional licensing in the workforce we're talking about about 120,000 for monitors of which for OPR's jurisdiction extends to about half others are licensed by uh entities such as the agency of education the department of health DPS so as we approach this one of the nice things about being OPR and the government operations committees is that the structure of our law if you're going to deal with you know if you're trying to drive high level policy across diverse professions because we have the umbrella structure that you're all familiar with from your previous committee work with title three laying out rules of general application for all of the individual columns of profession and then each individual column occupying a chapter in title 26 whereas in some states where we don't have a structure like that one would have to go in profession by profession make amendments to idiosyncratic laws and each time you do the the profession thinks it's been singled out and says why are you doing this whereas in the structure that that you have you're able to go in it's very simple mechanically because you can apply a general rule of general application directly in title three and have it distributed out to all the title 26 chapters and it's politically easy because nobody feels picked on is you know if somebody says well why have we been selected for this so we really haven't the same rule is applying to dentists as to nurses as to electrologists so it makes it makes it very nice both for you for ledge counseling for us to be able to attack large-scale problems like this where the solution is a rule of common application in many cases and if i may add we have done that with military licensing is a great example of where title three application has applied across all of our programs in one spot so that is a an approach that we would recommend with regard to this population as well i i actually have to say that i like your approach in here about matching the individual needs of the immigrant community and with the state needs and i underline one here the liberty interests of people to fulfill their human potential by applying their trades for the benefit of those who wish to engage them converges with an economic imperative to make for month welcoming i mean it's put trying to put those things together is very i think unique in a government report we're we're really lucky to have this particular subject matter and i think make getting this right is a tripartisan issue whether you care about you know whether you care about economic development see the world through that lens whether you care about individual liberty and see the world through that lens you come to the same conclusion and that this is a really neat area of subject matter to work with because what's good for one is good for all kind of so and it's a very significant i was surprised myself when our our data stats analysts are responsible for digging up some of the percentages and whatnot i mean when you consider on the numbers how many people were talking about who were born overseas that we're trying to accommodate and that we're competing for in many cases at 50 of the rn workforce that's 150 of the number of rns were left-handed i mean consider that i mean that's that's really a lot of people and so the effects are non-trivial of getting this right and as the chair said we are in some ways in an economic competition to become attractive and welcoming to skilled professionals oh yeah we are from i can do more than the united states is at the moment open it's arms in some ways that creates opportunities for us to say you know this is a place where you can come and you can maximize your potential based on the learning you've done and we will ensure that it is not unduly difficult for you where it might be other places um and so when we looked at the when we began the report we started um with the obvious questions you know how how many citizenship mandates do we have and in many states those are common where there's just sort of an unreasoned you know there's got to be a citizen there to qualify um and then we asked the same question about English language mandates in in professional licensing there are cases where English proficiency may be relevant to whether or not one can safely provide services to English and to an English speaking public but there are fewer than one thinks um and we go into that in a little bit uh but uh you know we asked those high level questions and then surveyed the our statutes and our administrative rules and what we found was pretty encouraging this state by comparison to most um it's relatively free of arbitrary citizenship mandates um we wrote in the report about the couple we found but they were more about board and commission membership than they were about who may be licensed and so that's really fortunate the only licensing mandate of all the funny things uh was notaries i think one has to be a citizen to be a notary you're talking about notary public loan signing we just passed that one there is some rational reason why that might be imposed but um in many ways the news is good if you look at our existing statutes and rules by comparison to those of other states they are comparatively free of unnecessary language barrier or language proficiency mandates and unnecessary citizenship mandates so that we don't see a proliferation of those that we would have to untie both this body and the administrative agencies adopting rules have been judicious in their use of those requirements um i i don't know if everybody actually had a chance to read in-depth would you talk some about the the immigration statistics demographics and i don't know if you you're kind of past that in your in the report but i i think that's really important sure i mean from our analysts we have uh an assessment that immigrants making up 13 and a half percent of the national population 70 percent of the active workforce um that's an extraordinary number of people and many more than i would have intuitively thought i think many more than many of our monitors would have intuitively thought um even more outsize uh immigrant representation in the STEM professions in the in the science technology engineering and mathematics professions um at 40 percent of medical scientists 28 percent of physicians and surgeons 15 percent of rams um and so you know again benchmark that the every popular or 10 percent of your population's life time i mean i mean when you think of the scale there that's a really significant to be able to do that in the medical sciences where most of our licensing is um and in engineering um you know you're working we're in in professions where people able to do those jobs our immigrants are overrepresented among those folks so the effects of improving things there can really be non-trivial so these are national statistics these aren't they uh workforce statistics is it roughly similar to vermont or do we not have the data we don't have great data they we're small enough in size and i had asked our analysts about that that the federal government wants us in with other states and we can't disaggregate vermont and the other state were data pooled with um so that's what we're looking at um oh i apologize i'm on the fourth page of the report thank you there there are there are indeed yeah but on this i mean like anecdotally we can all talk about the number of our doctors now who are uh you can look at page four at the bottom so you're looking at you know in vermont we have a smaller immigrant population on the coastal states for example at four percent of the state population so more but no surprise to most of us that the state is a little bit more homogenous than others demographically but even so um a considerable immigrant representation notably and this comes important to the recommendations canada is the biggest contribute um and canada um is sort of a special case too because as we later on in the report we talk about just sort of the practical realities of it's never going to be possible to send a bureaucrat like me out and say we'll just go figure out what the ways is equivalent sorry to every country on earth it's quite possible to do that with canada and you can look into the provinces they have um regulatory systems that are a lot like ours um they have graduate education systems that are a lot like ours they do differ in some ways we've actually seen you know it's it's need to be opr because you i think we may perceive problems a little bit more rapidly because they're hitting us in multiple fields and we have seen that with you know one of the unique characteristics of the canadian education system and graduate education system and some european systems compared to the united states systems is that the educational apparatus is more tightly controlled by the state and often administers the licensing and we had this case with canadian engineer coming in we said well where's your your canadian national exam and he said well i graduated the engineering program what's your problem and you know in that system and this was he was from kebac that was the equivalent and um but most of our laws and rules are written to presume that everybody's training system looks like ours when in fact um we're a bit of an outlier for relying upon independent third parties for um a great deal of occupational testing um so we uh well it's not the european system is much more like our apprenticeship and in uh programs where by just by virtue of going through the apprenticeship program you are certified yes i think there are more apprenticeship programs and similarly their um graduate you know their university graduate all programs are kind of like your apprenticeship yeah so you would you would when you graduate from school in america you almost always have to take a test after you're done and then and in the provinces when you graduate from a higher education you're you don't have to take another test you are done i think the the statistics would shock probably most reminders it did me that their part they were 56 percent more likely to graduate degree than i and i think that when i'm fortunate when we think of immigrants or at least recent immigrants joining the workforce and so we think of them at every level positions and we don't take into account all the the training that they i mean i i i i found that really it's funny i and i just because i've had so many doctors that are that are a particularly a asian i mean in my face bears the marks of a persian who was my fabulous skin doctor and did two cancer surgeries on my nose and so you know i think of all great mows surgery people being i think that we experience a lot of the medical world and we don't even think about what we do but we win when you say immigrant that is not the vision i think that comes to most reminders mine i think i may be wrong but the coverage that's been done yeah farm workers and you know things like that one thing that really came to my mind at the meeting at then burlington was i wondered how many of the people who are working at twincraft etc could have had a professional license option yes if there was a clear pathway and so i want to make sure that we are working with those communities even in the business communities to help their employees gain professional licensure or um their their spouses their children whatever permutation um that we are integrating with the business community because i think that there are skilled professionals who are immigrants who are working in manufacturing jobs yeah because they don't know how to parlay their experience in their in their home country into this new country and the other thing that was really amazing is from that meeting for me was the conversation of the networks i would have assumed that the immigration networks were very intense but not being part of one myself i don't understand how um you know people were saying that people um that an employee will bring in other employees to come work and so i think if opr and the state in general in licensing were able to be more open we'd be able to um be more accessible to those communities and right now we've done not enough work reaching out to those almost no average well it was starting yeah we're starting this is a good start this uh frame this report is you know we did this in a hurry on a shoestring while we're pretty spread pretty thin what's great about it is you know i think it's the beginning and not the end of a conversation about this topic you know we have been before this committee in previous sessions talking relentlessly about interstate mobility and trying to improve fluidity of the United States labor among the states and this is the next rational step in that effort um you know terribly important as we talked about not just important to our economy but important to maximizing the human potential of the people who are here it just it's a tragedy to have someone who has attained substantial expensive difficult training show up in the wrong jurisdiction before regulator who just to whom it means nothing it just means nothing and that's the frustrating thing about licensing the flip side of that is licensing must enforce a standard and if it doesn't you know we will either endanger people or and or cause our credentials to cease to be recognized by states because they can't know what the credential really signifies so it is important to maintain that that core function the protective function of licensing but in so many cases there are ways to be less binary you know the the trouble is you either check every single box and you get the license and you're okay or you're missing one of them or all of them and that's all the same to us because you're not having it and the challenge and the opportunity here is to find ways whether it is through credentials verification services which do exist and are incorporated in some of the larger licensing programs in nursing and medicine for example um and bring that to a broader range of professions because although those exist they really is little legal and administrative structure for using them outside of the the large large professions and so we can do a better job in one of our recommendations is to consider title three language that gives a place to credential verification some structure around how it would occur and then what would be the legal effect if the director for example were to conclude that a credential has been certified as equivalent um then you could say to all of the licensing boards under title 26 thou shalt recognize that as the equivalent to what you're asking for um so all of those are kind of neat opportunities to do simple things to be a little bit less binary um an additional recommendation that we talk about is making possible bridge licensing right now when people like lauren and i and the people we work with talk about limited licensing it's always with somebody who's been disciplined you know you have some kind of practice deficiency or hurt a patient it would be typical to do you know because of this misconduct or malpractice we would conditional license and say somebody has to work with you have to work under somebody's supervision while we make sure that you're up to standard there's really no provision like that for people who haven't done anything wrong but who may come from a situation where you were three quarters of the way through graduate school when the war started you right uh you know you didn't do anything wrong but it is impossible for us as regulators to verify that you meet the standard that we need you to meet is there something we can do and often that would be a non-disciplinary bridge program where we could take a Vermont licensee we knew met standard who was established in the field pair you with that person and then have a period of supervised practice and then apply perhaps the domestic exam that we've always applied to everyone to verify that you have a book learning verify your clinical experience through a bridge program and enable you to attain a license that you might not otherwise have been able to attain without repeating a substantial piece of the education you had already done that's a way to expand the concept of apprenticeships um into programs that are not apprenticeship friendly the bridge licensing I'm just sorry I'm just looking for that in your recommendations and I I just don't see bridge in in the title of any one of them but I here I read it many times I don't remember where leveraging apprenticeships on the top of the last page for one that talks about bridge programs I kept I changed terminology on here a few times at one point I think on page 11 the heading calls a transitionalized yeah I just didn't see a bit okay established transition translation that's translation well on the top of the last page it does refer to it the last page the third heading on page 11 so I apologize if we get at the bottom rather than the top there's the authorized non-disciplinary conditional limit in the transition back to the bridge programs on the next page and I should say this committee and OPR you know are sort of an advantage position in terms of perceiving these the areas that needed to be sanded off and improved as cases come at us and just in the past few years you through the OPR bill relieve substantial burdens on immigrant dentists and nurses until I think it was last year that was until until last year until this summer if one did not have a domestically earned DDS or DMD degree you could simply never be a general dentist you're kidding that is true and we were one of the last states to get rid of that requirement I think we were the fifth to be we were the the last what the last of five and as a result have you is it too early to see how many have applied we've already seen an uptick I think the internet's an amazing thing and I think people find out and but yeah the solution that was applied in last year's bill really works pretty simply it says we have terrific grad and relatively short graduate dental specialty programs that are like periodontics and um what else orthopedic um braces orthodontist orthodontist yes not orthopedics we don't want feet in the mouth well we've got a lot of I know big shortage in periodontics et cetera and you know we talked to the dental board in the Vermont state dental society and looked at our own folks and and we thought you know we have these are competitive graduate programs they're not letting in anybody who applies they they'll do the screening of how was your overseas general dentistry training and then once they have graduated if they had what it took to get admitted to that competitive program and they had what it took to pass that competitive specialty program we don't need to worry so much about where did the general dentistry training come from and so in that way it is now possible effective just the past summer to become a general dentist in the united states though you did not do your primary training here before that you would have read a repeat dental school i consider how wasteful that is so that we think is terrific for romaners it's you know we we need more dentists we need more access to dental here and fair to people as well a similar thing presented itself in nursing where there were because of a quirk in our statute if you were i think it was a practical nursing chapter we've ended the last year if you were educated overseas again and you hadn't gone right to work even if ever i don't know that every state around us would license you that i know that massachusetts would and you know even if massachusetts and main had given you a nursing license and let you work for the past 30 years and you've done great under because our law yeah i don't think it was intentional but because our law was written around the presumption that you would have domestic training you were just out of luck in vermont and so we changed that so i mean the good news the bad news is things like this can happen if you are inattentive the good news is that over the years and in part because we run an annual bill through these committees correcting um unfair situations or undesirable situations that we observe when we've detected a problem like this because of our partnership with you and because of the annual nature of the bill we've been able to correct it quickly um but there there is more work to be done um you know i don't think there are many states where you know people in lauren shoes and mine would have the kind of relationship with the legislature and with the professional community to just say okay this happened i can't happen again let's let's make sure it's fixed and have it done within the year that's really you know we're lucky to be in this state so you know i'm having to take it a question you have to walk through the baseline recommendations um one of the other items that that we noticed when kind of going through our law to look for unnecessary and arbitrary barriers of the simplest kind was that we're not the only source of them we need to remember how many third parties we rely on in the administration of these licensing programs um and that's a real blind spot to us where we know we're realizing we have to be we have to scrutinize carefully who we rely on because although vermont well we usually say the director will examine lauren isn't sitting at our desk writing the octology examination obviously we have a third party um national administrator can i read this paragraph in case people haven't have you read the yellow report okay i just want to read this paragraph which goes to that because i think it's one of the funniest on page 10 opa recently discovered that the provider on which it relied for cosmetology examination refused to translate its exam refused to allow translator in the exam room and zealously enforced an english only requirement and respect even to the labels on cosmetic products and devices used by examinees this meant that the provider not the state decided that english language proficiency was prerequisite to licensure as a cosmetologist the provider explained its rule is necessary to protect the public but the explanation takes nothing in a forced choice between hair dye instructions your stylists can understand and hair dye instructions you can understand while captain sitting in a chair go with the bottle the stylist can read this is if you haven't read the report the whole thing reads like that well we the deputy head secretary of state is we're very hard to give me to stop doing things just like that no no no no no no no no no no not turn this humor turn move his legal he's in latin but i love his latin i'm kidding but the thing is um you know there's a huge difference between english proficiency and conversation and to have a barrier to a marketplace based on english proficiency by a third party that we weren't even aware was doing that so that was the third party that was a third party so we were hearing stories of nail technicians who were struggling to pass the exam and we were saying why they've done the apprenticeship they should understand what they're doing it's because of this exam provider and um so we're trying to create a third avenue a third rail to get into the profession not based on just get rid of the third that exam that's happening um also as a result of last year's bill um we are you you cut substantially in last year's bill the number of hours of private should really become extraordinary um implemented in last year's bill a one of the most liberal entry requirements in the country where if you can show you are working anywhere in the world for a year in the profession verify it we have no other questions and you can have a license um in the barber and cosmetology nail technician professions um so simple things like that and what lauren's talking about and what you're seeing there and which is kind of illustrating this kind of knee slapping way which i guess isn't funny if it hits you though i mean that we learned about this was a real human being um is that smart and we say elsewhere in the report smart immigrant licensing policy starts with smart licensing policy and that in turn starts with really sticking with the chapter 57 principles that opi tries to make sure drive its its policy opinions um and one of those goes straight to this english language thing he said we have to remind ourselves why we license and the primary reason we license somebody is to level off information asymmetry out there in the marketplace it's a big deal the person that i think is an oncologist is faking it that's a big deal uh and so the government steps in and verifies that the person in fact has the training that a medical doctor would have and the hospital make sure the person has the tertiary board credentials the person should have but as you move into other areas we begin inquiring into things that are irrelevant that to anything the consumer doesn't already know language is a great example of that if i go to a hairstylist and i conclude for myself that he or she and i are not communicating effectively enough for me not to come away looking in a way i don't want to be made to look i can just say thanks a lot i think look at the time i'll maybe i'll go down the street i don't need the government to tell me that because it is plainly obvious when you converse with another person whether or not you're conversing effectively whatever the reason is um so it's you know the government is sort of in many of the states where the these requirements obtained especially about language it's sort of the state stepping in to say well we'll make sure you're protected from this thing that you could very well see with your own eyes and so um what could be managed on the employer level as well i mean it's not just the consumer you know for a foreign trained nurse for example who may not have English proficiency by a state by national exam or a state exam maybe have excellent bedside manner may and may with just a little training be able to handle the entire population on the floor and that should be managed by the employer not by me in an office so exactly this i mean not going to find yourself in a professional role without encountering either a client who knows how well he or she communicates with you or a in the outside is a hiring committee nobody just says oh you're in i mean you get interviewed and um so whenever we impose a requirement whether it's language or any other we ought to be asking ourselves over and over is this really a relevant and necessary test to apply for the purpose of protecting the public before somebody gets a license in a remarkable number of cases the answer is no um and there are other areas where we have to be careful of intermediaries with good intentions imposing requirements we didn't intend a good example is in the rehabilitation of people with minor criminal pass this body has been very clear over the years as is the as is the judiciary that we want to favor rehabilitation we really we're not going to use professional regulation and licensing to apply a secondary punishment for punitive purposes to somebody who did something wrong five 10 15 years ago and that's good policy the trouble then can occur and i think this may have happened with pharmacy technicians before we liberalized the created more avenues and you get a national uh certifying authority that begins to build a program and it matures and they start to write their own requirements all of a sudden they're directing the criminal backgrounds of people and we think to ourselves as licensing as a licensing authority wait a second we got a legislature that told us what to do and i'm not real comfortable that somebody before i even know it without my knowledge or any any system for appeal as we have when the government itself does this sort of thing is telling a group of people while you you're doing y1 from 15 years ago means you can't do pharmacy technician i don't know that anything that agrees is happening but in many many cases we do have them in the years applying tests we often don't even know about because we haven't worked and if i just may we are pretty committed to continue to review those instances in OPR this report was a great opportunity to sort of duo and a quick fast not thorough introspection of our programs our third parties but we did not have an opportunity to review AOE's third party public safety's third party we'll talk about that but i think that there are i would just one of the things that when you were talking about it reminded me that the exam itself i mean the written exam itself and we ran into this with lawn with the academy where there would be a an incident described and then five responses which one is the right response and the person knew exactly what the response should be but english is such a nuanced nuanced and crazy language that you couldn't tell in reading them you couldn't tell the difference between them so um they have re-looked at their exam to try to to try to but there might be other exams for professions where the exam itself is is um yeah well we even have a barrier when someone comes into our office off the street or calls us we don't have a great translation service to utilize um that can happen to us in a professional conduct hearing or if somebody is wanting to inquire how they get licensed we can have some language barriers and obviously want people to understand what's required of them what's in the application that is an available state government for you to say we need this and call somebody to get it i mean surely there are tons of translators in the state government there's remarkable in the executive licensing bureaucracy remarkably few in the judiciary for example there's you know a language line set up where if i go to if i go to the court clerk's office and we have a cooperative agreement sharing resources it's certainly something to look at i mean as between the two separate you know judicial and executive branches of government that could be a challenge but in terms of you know plenty of the executive does have this so yeah hs does this and so that's within the five solely five languages in dmv that's what we heard yeah that's pathetic so we mean those that could be just taken up with ones we already know and not unusual ones are not reflective of the latest inflow of okay it just has when you get information from a just it um it lists about 20 languages on the front once you can so maybe a hs a just you could i won't prompt me promises on there but i don't know how thin stretch they are but we absolutely should look at those pieces of the executive branch that are already doing this right and see if we can get on board because in licensing as long as that when someone comes to our office yeah we don't necessarily have any ready way to communicate you need to start developing though i mean we can call at least to help yeah i mean right now we're relying on relatives quite frequently um but that's not sufficient and not quite frankly not welcoming um and i'm not the right i'm not professional not professional not the right look for our office um we we need something i wonder if there is an internet an app that translates that i wonder if there's an app that you guys could get that is that could do almost simultaneous translation like the un has there is such a thing i mean there is you can actually as my phone goes off um there are apps that will translate text you literally put the camera and get a transition how accurate they are in terms of capturing nuance and a document of legal significance i think is it well or what it should be it was at your door i mean how do you get an app that then can translate what they're saying so that you can understand it in real time that i think that exists i bet you dollars to donuts that i don't doubt that you're right i'm not certain of how perfect that technology is but the basic you know it's an opportunity you know to communicate could you please show me where the nearest bathroom is i think such an app exists i'm interested in dentistry right i was a dentist in samaya yes how can you help me and yeah i think this language translation is a big unexplored area for most of the licensing bureaucracy including lpr so we can you know it's an area where we can do better so you know i'm having to take questions you may have or walk through the kind of concrete recommendations that we had had suggested i'm really trying to look at this in terms of as we already talked about the very broad view of a very broad range of professions we don't mean to make it all sound easy there are some areas where the technical specificity is such that you really might not be able ever to truly make the column friendly to an applicant from an educational system that you really couldn't see on the ground but in so many you can and often that just means doing smart things it also means not imposing licensing barriers generally don't need to be there i'm talking to report about and we've had calls like this from people who have moved to or not from other states or to not from other countries you want to get into massage therapy which is subject to the sunrise where we discourage regulating that you feel and it was for reasons just like we've seen people call saying okay you know i'm biting my lip and i'm getting ready to start the three month process of proving out much suck you we say no you know our legislature said we really don't need to be in there you you know go register corporations in five minutes and go forth you know you and we get emails back and do i can't believe i can do that i just you know it's amazing to me i can do that um so good immigrant licensing policy starts with good licensing policy and we so we talk in the report about leveraging apprenticeship that's something that matters not only to immigrant professionals but also to younger monitors and mid-career changers the student loan debt is a major economic issue to the point that i think serious policies students of policy are very concerned that is having an effect on ownership it's having an effect on the home buying market i was having an effect on the upper mobility of young people so apprenticeship solves many of these problems at once it is especially you know where you may have somebody from an immigrant community is most comfortable mentoring under where somebody from the same community or may have a common language with that person it's a great way to accomplish a lot of that professional training and verification and i feel like we're coming from a period of years in the 90s and early aughts when apprenticeship was seen as this kind of medieval thing that was you know let's get rid of it in fact we see we have a couple disused apprenticeships particularly of you first of the effect apprenticeship can have on making professional categories more open to folks from other states and other countries and also because of the effect the apprenticeship can have on combating unnecessary student loan debt we really think it's a very important future model that to the extent that we've got disused categories we should revive them and we are actually doing that in arbor and cosmetology etc funeral service and i think we would love to do that there's something in the opr bill this year on an apprentice track for them we're actually very well suited just within the state i think opr is better seated than it has been more integrated with the department of labor i'm now on a workforce development subgroup specifically on a valuable credential and what that means and that group is fascinating because i pointed out to them last time that we didn't have any anybody there from the refugee or immigrant community and so we're going to try and figure out how to invite someone from that community to that subgroup to come talk to us but you know it has the agency of education with the technical programs doc with their internal programs so are you on our career pathways the subgroup no you're on the credentials i'm on the credentials i'm on the career pathways one yeah in some ways that we're interested in so yeah it would be so yeah so we're talking about and at least from my view um opr is seated closer to the table with other people who are working on the same things right and i think that that's a goal um clearly expressed in this report too is that we need more communication more inter reliance on each other um between agencies between how licensing agencies do it but not just our licensing silos but also the department of labor we need to integrate with the department of labor to help them understand what we're doing so that they understand the apprentice track in barbering cosmetology and so that aoe who's running the tech program understands the apprentice track in cosmetology and barbering so that we can funnel people into these programs into a valuable career pathway and and professional license or um occupational license of plumber and electrician plumber electrician in vermont that's a very good career at this moment so um that in some of our in some of our professions is at the higher end of our income potential so um getting people integrated into those services whether they're immigrant populations or native vermont are so to that and i would uh now that you're part of that working group which is great um uh with sarah bach sooner jess uh i would encourage you to also see how opiart could integrate itself into the one-stop portals that the we owe our money is financed uh that are in being rolled out around the state only one image county and you know it's really going to hopefully be a one-stop place for people with with all their needs related to learning to work for to uh to work to everything and it would be great for you guys to be a piece of that citizenship that's not a requirement of willa is it i wasn't sure about that but i would i wouldn't you know you now are working with sarah and jess i said yes so i would sophie yager and sophie yager and sophie yager was not deal well though but sarah and jess are and they they are really um very interested in this kind of work great so i just have a question about the deal raised is did the national licensing or credentialing programs have any impact on this and how do we deal with that by nationally credentialing there's usually credentialing programs not licensing right yes i mean there's kind of a complex i mean across the professions there's kind of this complex web of governmental and non-governmental certifying going on for example there as you know there's a 1nd license the doctor's license that we issue with the board medical practice issues and they don't distinguish a pulmonologist from a heptologist that's all happening at the level of non-governmental board certification and accreditation um and the medical field is doing a very good job of recognizing immigrant professionals it's not um it's not uh without weight that there are so many immigrant doctors it's because they rely on what gave us discussing in um page nine at the bottom the third no it is page i'm sorry page eight at the bottom the uniform credential verification process the medical particularly the physician community has really needed to rely on that and there has been a demand for physicians that exceed our national borders and so that third-party credential verification has been very effective there um and i don't think that um license certification in those fields requires citizenship or english proficiency they're all exam based and and third-party law verified and we're going to have 3500 nurse shortage in 10 years 3500 beach shortage of the yeah it's it's a certainly an interesting time and a good time to open ourselves up to school people from elsewhere so some i think take else questions some exam services um we still need to do some inquiry into this whether some national exams might require graduation from a national school whether some national um exams may require english proficiency um whether um a certification body say an APR and certification body may have some of those requirements baked within it that we're not familiar with that's that's work that we still need to do so i don't have a clear answer i don't think it has a clear answer either because we know of it in some spaces um for instance in the cosmetology exam that that was the one that that really hit us on the face um this year um but and required us to inquire but we should we should be inquiring um across all of our now 48 programs there are real challenges here in the sense of you know nationally where the states tend to force one another up a credential escalator and if you deviate from it you can have negative unintended effects on the out portability of your own people and therefore the desirability of your license for example if we said you know in the column of social work we don't really think anymore you have you need to have a master's degree um other states could quickly start saying well you can't endorse him from vermont because they're not equivalent to air credentials and we could have a counter productive effect unfortunately as these as time wears on the you know degree inflation happens and the credential escalator happens and it's a very hard cycle to break and i don't want to you know make it all rosy in the sense that we can just do x and not have any consequences in some cases if you deviate from the national model you can have negative effects on your licensees and the desirability of your license um and if you deviate a lot you stop performing the core public safety the public protection function but in so many cases we're not even close to that line so i know it was mentioned when we did the walkthrough of the secretary of state's office um how opr received the federal department of labor grant um specific to reducing barriers of entry to professions um one of the four focus groups of that grant so there's four focus groups let me back up there's four focus groups for that grant one being immigrants the other being the chronically poor and underprivileged third is people with criminal backgrounds and fourth is military families so um opr responded to a grant again with brilliant writing from gave um and we were awarded a grant a three-year grant 150 thousand dollars every year for three years we have started working with that and we're part of a consortium of states we're one of ten um and so there are conversations happening at the national level on licensing with the national council of state governments is the that sort of liaison in head of this occupational licensing work through the federal department of labor so there are conversations happening about how to reduce barriers for immigrants the other thing is that members of our boards and Gabe and i for our advisor professions do go to national regulatory associations so these are the people who normally administer the tests so for in social work we go to the ASWB meetings and they promulgate and offer the test and um one thing that is imperative as a small state of Vermont is that we can go to those meetings and say hey what are we doing about accessibility to my to the migrant professional and you know we're just Vermont but Vermont is very mighty and as we know and we can affect some change on the national level or at least prompt some conversations those questions at those meetings so what were the four groups again low-income immigrant um people with criminal backgrounds and military families and we have six of our regulatory programs selected barber and cosmetology funeral pion security pharmacy real estate and nursing and it was it was a grant like a barriers for licensing barriers to all licensing of barriers so specific to um professional licenses that did not require a baccalaureate degree so it was of the goal of the grant was to reduce barriers of entry to professions that did not require a baccalaureate degree with those four populations in mind it is interesting that that ratcheting up with the educational requirements because and it seems to me that it's probably kind of cyclical the more the fewer people you have going to school the more emphasis the college has put on having a degree and put pressure on their accrediting people to get more people to come to school so then it just keeps i was part of that rat race this is something to look out for when we are seeing in the professions is devious a little bit from immigrant specific matters but i mean yeah we that's lauren i had been working this session and the opr bill will reflect um an effort to modernize the athletic trainer scope of practice and speaking with our advisors though and this is not an isolated case but a good illustration of it just as we have third party intermediaries imposing requirements about criminal background or language proficiency we didn't know about we it is possible for an accreditor to wag the dog in a way oh and say you know in a few years you're you know used to be a bachelor's profession and i'm now it's going to be a master's profession used to be a master's profession now it's going to be a doctor um and the academy is not going to tell you that's unnecessary they're going to tell you the high schoolers come to us knowing less every year and you know and um you know so now the bachelor's degrees the new high school department measures the new associates whatever um but look out for it because the the net effect can be really pernicious for young people where athletic training used to be a baccalaureate training program and then you were ready to enter the marketplace and provide those services with you know four years of debt isn't good but it's fewer than seven and we're watching that go up and even the professionals in the field we talk to say it doesn't make sense you know you said what's the new curricular content you know what's the what's done what's what's being added in this you know about $50,000 yeah and we've got a world where we have young people entering their first serious jobs half a million dollars in debt and that is a major problem and licensing is a tool that can contribute to that it's it there's not an easy solution of a lot of this stuff but it's certainly something to look out for and it's very hard to argue against ever more education you know well but in some cases the plus of our workforce development work in this state uh is that we are going back to exactly what you're talking about here which is looking at re-looking at apprenticeships and really underscoring the value of I like the way you describe underappreciated apprenticeships are underappreciated and that we should be looking at what was your nice word you use disuse that had fallen into disuse and that that should be revived and and I think they are being slowly revived they are being the CTE program is the better the CTE program the better that very true in the in the I should say they're I kind of make the colleges the bad guy not always you know in in funeral service for example uh CCV has been a critical component of we had a funeral service model that was our board in addition to saying it wanted to switch to an advisory model said we want to get out of the national model for funeral service because the nearest school I think was Boston and then you had to go to like Minnesota or New York that's great the school that graduated most new funeral directors in New York had a big testing scandal that threatened the licenses of half the funeral directors in New York caused a huge mass the whole system fell apart but had kind of an opportune time because it made everybody step back and we said wait a second you know why don't we have a system where a Vermont who wants to get into the field can do that without leaving the state of Vermont for two years and without going 50 or 70 thousand dollars into death and it turned out we can do that we we the funeral directors association worked with CCV and their and their curriculum director we got heads together they came up with I think it's a eight or twelve course sequence right where they said you know here's the core things you know bereavement and and counseling and the business uh business law etc and the mob and then some period of apprenticeship and if you paired with apprenticeship and so the net cost of going from identifying funeral directorship as something you want to do to being licensed it will fall dramatically and the optician 60 percent was the analysis should be amazing and the optician re field is also an excellent example it used to be that an associates degree it was kind of a mostly disused somewhat used apprenticeship but generally speaking you have to leave the state because what I don't even think we had an optician program anymore get an associates degree we were just talking with a witness upstairs about the optician re amendment he said well you need you know about five thousand dollars a semester for four semesters is about twenty thousand dollars the the career progression program that is recognized in this year's OPR bill costs nine hundred dollars and you can do it online if you get the digital books if you want hard copy the charge of eleven hundred and they'll finance it so that me and so we will can take that field from one where you had to leave the state of Vermont to get the formal training and be five figures in debt to one where a vermoner who may not have any available cash can initiate that training and do it from home which which is great and supports our state college system all at the same time exactly i think i think there are opportunities to talk about the ccb one which ccb offers that the funeral they're offering it through a lot of it through distance learning and many of what they'll many of the core courses i mean when i met with them i met at the wanooski campus but um it will be available i think the most of the courses in that sequence do require some physical attendance but it's limited and so most of the course instruction can be had online so if you think it's opening fall of 19 that's right there was fall that's for this fall so and some of these good ideas have come from the regulated community itself funeral and optician certainly have some of them require the state to say don't be so protective and of your marketplace and so that can be sometimes a and a harder conversation funeral it was a fairly easy conversation because and dentistry was a fairly easy conversation just anecdotally because those two communities were struggling to find people to buy their practices there was there was i had one correspondent when i was general counsel for dentistry um i had like a pen pal a woman in retland who was wanting to sell her practice and couldn't find anybody um a dentist and just she just was like please do this i have a buyer but she just needs to get a license and you can do it and please do it um and it had the support of the association so that was a very successful story but that really came from the community having a desperate need other times um it this it's a really a place where there needs to be active state supervision to say no this is an unnecessary barrier you're putting up um we don't need to do that um you haven't thought about x y z and b um and all implications that can have so we see it in two um ways coming from the profession and also from us saying to the profession don't do this right thank you i'm i'm going to read this before next week what day are they on deck first friday friday at one fifteen i think oh we're going to say the best for life right did i give it back to you all right all right good thank you thank you thank you i understand this it's a neat issue well and we will make sure that our other committees are aware of the i think this is going to be one of the things that we kind of as a whole senate are going to in different committees are going to look at that um now if we could just get you to solve getting um is it h one five h one b visas for our undocumented dairy workers could we please do that federal immigration policy is its own is its own monster and unfortunately it's lurking behind this whole thing yeah i know it is it is anyway okay so thank you thank you