 We're going to get underway here at a full morning. We will take a break around 10 o'clock so people can stretch their legs and get a snack or whatever they need to do. So if we could take a quick go around the room and we'll find out who all's here and make sure that everybody who's here knows who we are. Okay, so if we might start with you, sir. I'm Curtis Reed. I'm Executive Director of Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity. I'm Gary Scott. I'm the Lieutenant of the State Police. I'm the Churchill LGBTQIA Alliance of Vermont. Karen Richards, Executive Director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission. I'm Xander Landon, Reporter with Vermont Data. I'm Tom Walden, General Counsel for the Department of Human Resources. And Commissioner Festigio will be here shortly. Thank you. Emily Adams, Attorney General's Office, Civil Rights Unit. Julio Thompson will be here a bit later this morning. Okay, okay. Thank you. I'm Laura Simon. I'm a member of the Racial Justice Coalition. Diana Walling with the Community Equity Collaborative of Southeast Vermont. And Emily, right? Yes, I'm Emily Miller, Office of Legislative Counsel. And Warren can be the first one to introduce himself to our guests. Good morning. I'm Warren Kitzmiller. I represent Montpelier, so welcome to my district. And John? I'm John Gannon from Wilmington, representing Halifax, right here in Wilmington. Cindy Reed from Innisfurt, representing Montgomery also. Rob Clair from Berrytown and formerly number one in the March Madness basketball bracket. And now embracing that status. May the Townsend, South Burlington. Marsha Gardner, Richmond. This is Jessica Bromsted from Shelburne State, Georgia. She's lost a lot of weight. I'm Jim Harrison, formerly the representative from Chittenden. I understand that a member from Essex has moved to Chittenden and was on the news last night. And it says, representing Chittenden. Oh, really? Yeah, so I used to be from Chittenden, Vermont. I still am from Chittenden, Vermont. But I also represent Mendon. Great water. Yeah, you know. Apparently I don't know because I'm not there. That's why I wasn't at the meeting last night. Call yourself, it's okay. Get a workout. I'm Patty Lewis. I represent Berlin and Northfield. And I'm Dennis Devereaux from Mount Holly. And I represent Ludlow in Shrewsbury in fitness. Second in the March Madness school. And did win money, unlike him. The other one. And missing next to Warren is Tristan Tulino from Brattleboro, who has other responsibilities in this school. All right. So I'm looking at the list that we have for today. And Mark Hughes is going to be coming at 9.30 as opposed to now. So hopefully things will work out so that at 9.30 we can put him on. And I didn't hear that Kate Bowden was here. No. What Curtis Reed is. So if you wouldn't mind being our first witness of the day. Good morning. For the record, my name is. Is this turned in the right direction? Yeah, close enough. Okay. For the record, my name is Curtis Reed, Jr. Executive Director of Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity. And for full disclosure, I serve as chair of the Vermont State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. I'm a member of the Secretary of Education, Sir Aspen Hayes and the Imbilene Commission, a member of the State Police, Fair and Partial Police and Commission, and a founding member of the Community Equity Collaborative that serves South-Eastern Vermont. I'm going to say, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that is very impressive. Oh. And I kind of wish you got a little more slowly. But thank you. All right. I will read slower this time. In addition, I have served or currently serve as a consultant and trainer in the areas of inclusive bias and economic development for a variety of state agencies, including the Vermont State Police, Agency of Commerce and Community Development, the Department of Tourism and Marketing, the Agency of Natural Resources, Fish and Wildlife, and the Department of Human Resources. I also serve as a consultant and trainer in the area of diversity, inclusion, and equity for municipal governments, nonprofit organizations, and businesses in Northern New England. As a black man in Vermont, I'm acutely aware of the devastating impact that white supremacy and racism have on my life, in the lives of my children. However, I hope that the committee understands and appreciates there is a wide diversity of sociopolitical and economic thought amongst Vermont's communities of color. We're not a monolithic bloc, like you might find in 2001, you know, the large monolithic bloc in the movie. No, we're a much more diverse and nuanced than that. And while we may share the same goals to eradicate white supremacy and systemic racism, our, the way in which you go about that is, in some cases, radically different. Vermont Partnership was charted in 1995 as the oldest nonprofit organization in Vermont governed and managed by persons of color. Our current mission is to make Vermont an exceptional destination for everyone. Not everyone of us served in tight, like not all redheads or not all men, but for everyone. We are in year 15 of a 40-year initiative called Vermont Vision for a Multicultural Future. We have suppressed our socialization among instant gratification. We know that cultural shifts take time and that we are committed to working in an organic fashion in order for that to take place. We launched, with the Department of Tourism and Marketing, the Vermont African American Heritage Trail. We believe that our economic future is directly tied to our ability to attract service beyond expectation and retain consumers of color from all over the state. African Americans spent $83 billion on tourism and travel in the United States. Our best guesstimate is about 10 million of that $83 billion found its way into Vermont. So there is, I've been paying taxes in Vermont for 40 years and the only way they're going to get lower is that if we have more consumers here and we believe that there is an untapped market for outdoor enthusiasts, college students, families of color to really see Vermont as that destination. That is critically important that we shape state government but also the private sector in such a way that we are attracting and retaining business in this new marketplace. So we come at this from really an economic argument as opposed to a social-moral point of view. We also hold an annual conference, Vermont Digital Multicultural Future Conference, where we bring together executive-level, legislative-level, community-level leadership. It's sort of a marketplace to exchange promising practices. Things that are working in one place might work in another place, in another agency or another government. We believe in state government. We believe that there are things happening in state government that are good and positive. And we want to build on those. We build off this asset model, which is, yeah, there are good things that are happening, but maybe the next agency over the next public might not know the good thing that is happening. We tend to work in silos, and the purpose of this annual conference is to pull people out of their silos, particularly the ones that are doing what we consider exceptional work in this field, and to sort of postponate their experiences with others that may not be doing that work or may not see the work in the same fashion. And I can sit and talk until I'm almost blue in the face for that so many things aren't going to happen. But it's much more powerful when the secretary of one agency says to the secretary of another agency, or the commissioner of one agency says to the commissioner of another agency, well, this is what we've done, and these are tangible results of the work that we've been engaged in. And one such, we've been working in a state place for goodness, going on like 14 years now. But the shift is slow, but it is in fact, it's happening in ways that we can measure. I'm going to just pass around. This is the most recent, this actually is half the press from yesterday, traffic stop data, where we're looking at traffic stops of blacks and whites. And those who were searched, and you'll see from 2015 to 2016, is where precipitous drop in those searches. And this is because the police has leadership, oh, here, there we go, has dedicated leadership sort of addressing systemic racism and racial disparity. But it's taken them 14 years to get to where they are today. But they have a model that could easily be transplanted to other agencies. And this is what brings me to talk about 281. There is, first of all, I'm going to ask that the name be changed from civil rights officer to chief mitigation officer. Okay. This is more than just about civil rights and it sort of conflates the issue, at least from a marketing standpoint, of having a chief that is sufficiently vague, but at the same time, when asked, well, mitigation of what? Then I get into the whole conversation about systemic racism. I get into, you know, kind of looking at the best practices within state government. So what's that title? Mitigation, chief mitigation officer. Okay. It takes it out of that slippery slope of morality and of sort of social thought that we're really looking at, you know, how do we mitigate systems as they relate to X, Y, or Z. In section of the duties, the first duty you have is to oversee a comprehensive organizational review to identify systemic racism in each of these branches. I think that needs to be preceded with the identification of practices that eliminate or address systemic racism. Oftentimes, we spend our time totally focused on what's wrong to the extent that we lose sight of what's right and what's been affected. And so I would add something to oversee a comprehensive organizational review to identify efforts to address systemic racism and racial disparities as the very first thing. We want to accentuate the positive going into this work as opposed, and it's part of our asset model as opposed to a deficit model. Could you repeat that? Your suggestion? The suggestion that we... Oversee comprehensive review to identify efforts to address systemic racism and racial disparities. You'll find that state police has done an incredible job over the last 14 years. You'll find that agency of tourism and marketing and the agency of commerce has done a commendable job. The Department of Transportation has also been doing a really good job around recruitment, around workplace training. And so we're saying, let's give credit where credit is due as a starting point and as a point that would encourage others that may not be doing the work to say, look, Commissioner Anderson, don't tell me that that you can't do it because Commissioner Anderson would say, you know, we're doing it in our department. You know, Mike Sherrone would say to someone, well, no. Don't tell me that you can't do it because we're doing it in our agency. We think that is a much more powerful starting point than the starting point of, you know, you folks are really bad. You're not doing the right thing. And that's not the purpose of this body. We believe that it should be inspirational in the sense that we have some agencies or some departments that are doing a really good work and we would like to see others that will either match or exceed the work that they do. I just want to review the agencies which you mentioned. Do I have it correct if I have down here commerce, transportation, tourism, and public safety? Correct. Thank you. And there may be others out there. Those are the ones that come into our orbit. You might want to add fish and wildlife as well. And you might be scratching your heads and saying, why fish and wildlife? Well, you know, we're trying to attract Dominican fly fishermen to come up to Vermont. And the question is, well, would we be safe here? You know? Vermont has this progressive liberal veneer. Well, you know, we have this persona of being a progressive liberal state. But is there something beneath that progressive liberal veneer that says the folks of color don't come here? And we're saying that, no, there's really good reason to come to Vermont. You know, to visit any of the sites in the African American Heritage Trail. You know, adventure capitalists of color that ask me, well, you know, Vermont? Like, what's in Vermont? And, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, that are looking to relocate. So, you know, our experience runs the gamut from, you know, fly fishermen to, you know, tech companies to, you know, folks that are engaged in the arts. And so, fish and wildlife is in there because, you know, we've got people that fish and hunt and camp and... So, the paradigm shift that we'd like to create with this particular piece of legislation is focusing on that which is good, that which has been effective over time. And let's replicate that as a starting point, as opposed to a starting point of state government is the pits. You know, do anything right? Everything we do is bad. There is a clarity and call to attack when we're saying, no, that's not where we come from. We think that, I mean, I love Vermont. There are tons of folks that love Vermont. We want to see a state government do better. And we think this is one way in which that might happen. So, otherwise, I think the bill is great with those two exceptions of changing the name and then adding that number one as a preamble in many ways. So, the assumption that there are good things that are happening in the state government, we want to flush them out, shine a bright light on them so that others can, in fact, follow. Thank you very much. We've got some questions. I very much appreciate the glass half full approach. Well, it's three quarters full. That's been better. We've got Jim and Marcia. Curtis, thank you. The Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity is that have affiliates in other states or is it strictly a Vermont? We are a Vermont phenomenon. However, New Hampshire and Maine are interested in the model that we've been promoting here in those states. We've worked really closely with the Endowment for Health in Maine as well as the NAACP chapters that are in the Manchester area. Where I was going with it and you may or may not be aware, but what the bill asks us to set up from what we've learned yesterday is maybe unique. But I'm curious if you know of other states that have set up similar independent commissions, chief officers, et cetera. And if you were part of a national group you might have ready information on that. Maybe it's an unfair question. To our knowledge, this is the only state that's taking this on. There are some cities that have taken it on like Portland or Seattle, I think or two. As well as Burlington. Burlington, Vermont has a strategic plan for diversity and equity. They've been working on it for the last three years. They've got incredible sort of quantitative data. Can they set up a commission in Burlington? There is diversity and equity. The mayor reports back to them on an annual basis in terms of progress. This is more of a more respective kind of an enforcement arm. It's got subpoena powers. This is the only one. That's good to know. I also appreciate pointing out some of the positive and progress perhaps overall that we may. I'm curious as I look at this new board commission, new officer how do you think this will change it to get that other quarter if the glass is three quarters full? One is looking at data. One is really about the economic argument of why it's really important to address issues of systemic racism and racial disparities that there's an economic argument to that and in a state that needs 21,000 new workers annually just to maintain our current economic status the fact that we have the lowest birth rate in the nation the fact that we have the second highest age 18% of us. We have a few obstacles. We have some challenges in front of us that we really need to have everyone on board addressing these issues so that we do become the exceptional destination for a marketplace that we're just now beginning to enter into so whether it's looking at healthcare or looking if you want to attract retirees if you want to repopulate Wake Robin with the current demographic trend then you need to have healthcare that's responsive to the needs of a more culturally diverse and racially diverse population okay but specifically on this commission it sounds like more data you feel would be helpful there is an abundance of data currently what we don't have is we don't have an inventory of effective practices okay we can go to the department of health we can go to any of the other departments and most have disaggregated data by race and for the most part it doesn't look too good however there's no inventory of effective practices that would move to change those numbers for example we're working with our third commissioner second commissioner and third colonel we know that in the transition memo from one top leadership to the next includes specific language around very impartial policing so there's continuity even though Flynn left and then Ameson came in and Jim Baker was there and now Ernie Hamm in those transition memos from one to the other is really clear language around fair and impartial policing so that work that started 14 years ago to say police you're seeing the evidence of that in the paper that I just passed around to you a few minutes ago the same with tourism transportation equally as well that those transition memos really focus on areas that seek to reduce racial disparities now are they getting that overnight? No but we know in terms of effective practices that when an outgoing secretary an outgoing commissioner includes language around racial disparities you have a much better shot at that happening than simply falling by the wayside or falling through the cracks so it's helping each agency sort of identify those leverage those points of leverage that over time the kinds of changes that we think would make the reduction or elimination of racial disparities and addressing the system of racism we've got now Marsha Dennis and Rawls thank you I think you've addressed some of my questions already but I'll ask them anyway do you feel that this panel can make a difference and I too appreciate your positive outlook so my next question is how do you see this panel and the new chief mitigation officer working within state governments? the short answer is yes that they can make a difference and they will make a difference how they do that is really sort of the skill of the chief mitigation officer in communicating first and foremost that this is not a witch hunt that this is about identifying effective practices and moving those effective practices from one department or agency to another department or agency if the message is you're bad and we're going to come get to you and that leads to a level of dysfunction that will sort of hamstring the work of this particular body which is why it's important to add my opinion to add that initial piece around identifying promising practices Dennis Rawls so yesterday we heard Senator Collin were in Representative Christie and on page 2 on the advisory panel in the center of it it talks about the panel they consult with the governor's workforce equity and diversity content and the Human Rights Commission and others so the question for them and maybe some others in their room would want to answer too is how is this advisory panel going to differ differently than the governor's council and the commission that are already involved with these issues I'm not sure if there's a need to go beyond or maybe expand the council and the commission but I just what I said these other bodies are really into the needs Human Rights Commission really deals with individual cases the workforce development is providing well I think they just recently had their mandate was slightly changed during the session so they're really working around episodic events and this panel is really strategic in terms of looking long term and moving the dial in a way that is sort of addresses these sort of root causes but in a way that is focused on the economic benefit at the end of the day so you know that's and and one of the reasons of changing the name from civil rights to mitigation is when we think about civil rights we're thinking about the individual as opposed to the collective and we want to really speak to what this individual and this panel will do which is sort of the mitigation of systemic racism and racial disparities Thank you I don't know if you have any questions but I want to say you sound like you're very busy if this position was to come to fruition as you heard we have a lot of people here from a lot of organizations very diverse would you anticipate that any of these there wouldn't be a need for them anymore I guess if if this position was again to come to fruition what organizations that are in place now in positions would you envision there wouldn't be a need for you mean in the activist community or within state government I would say all I cannot think of an activist organization whose mission is to work themselves out of business okay we put a timeline on ours 40 years that we anticipate that in 40 years Vermont would be in a position of being one that exceptional destination with all the supports and services that go along with that and that our economic survival is critically dependent upon that and we figured 40 years should be sort of the right time for that to happen I don't give them a human nature there are always issues that will arise when the March of Dines eliminated polio they moved into birth defects so it really depends on those individual organizations I think within state government what we are looking for is the internalization of best practices around the limiting racial disparities I think state police is the furthest along in that process they have a standing fair and impartial policing commission that will continue to provide them longer to the future advice and counsel on data collection practices training for two percent and in many ways being an ambassador to other law enforcement agencies that ought to be doing what they're doing whether it's the sheriff's department or local PDC we would like to think that someone asked me when am I going to retire and get my responses well when people are good then I can retire we're going to have good people around thank you Cindy and then John I'm just looking for some clarification on this sheet here it looks like there's not as many searches going on you know as there used to be and it looks like it's pretty low actually like really low on this paper here this article in a Rotland Herald by these Vermont professor and their Cornell University professors minorities in Vermont are over searched but this data does not to me look like they're being over searched are there any data geeks in the room there's okay alright there's this notion the tyranny of small numbers okay and the data so it drops from 57 searches to 22 searches from 2015 to 2016 you know out of those 22 searches 19 contraband was found I think the national average for found contraband across the board is somewhere between yeah so it's about 10 to 12 percent of searches result in contraband Vermont State Police whether you're black or white the hit rates are in the 80s which has to do with the kind of training that they've been that they go through and also in terms of supervision that over the last several years has reduced the number of searches or stops the searches of motors of color so yeah there's this notion of being over searched which statistically is true but in the context we would argue differently so it's still an issue it's still an issue yeah it's still an issue and the you know as they drill down one of the things that state police can do is they can drill down into this data so we'll take a look at the 22 that were stopped you know or the 22 that was searched were there other circumstances that prompted the search we don't know that because there's a mandatory ticket or a mandatory citation and that's set up in the mind of the trooper oh if they're guilty of one thing then there might be something else happening or if they're observing behavior in the vehicle or if they're seeing things in the vehicle so this is the point where data is driving supervision issues training issues and ultimately what will be better service to the broader community so yes out of the you know almost 50,000 stops that were made 22 black voters were searched so Curtis I mean given that there are some clean models in state government already systemic racism the panel make up is you know every member is appointed by a different organization the Senate Committee on Communities, the Speaker of the House the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court the Governor and the Human Rights Commission the only restriction is they can't be a legislator do you think it's important to have someone with state government experience on the panel that's had some success with addressing these issues I'm just no the short answer is no what this panel is providing is an objective outside look of state government and it's difficult to do that from within and we fully support having a variety of agencies making appointments how many different organizations are represented on the on the milk commission or on the access board or Human Rights Commission this is parallel to that in the sense that we want to have a broad representation from agencies that are in fact critical to the success but at the same time we don't want a certain level of independence thank you any other questions the focus of this particular bill is to promote racial justice reform we know that there are many types of bias of misunderstanding if we if this bill scope was broad in your opinion would that render it ineffective or because the scope would be so wide or not there would need to be a narrow scope one because and again my own personal bias is really around economic development and you know the market that we're looking to attract is really around the social identity around race and so it's really narrow or if you want to broaden the mandate then you lose the possibility of sort of focusing on him being laser with laser precision in a new market that we're trying to really attract so I would not be in favor of expanding the scope of this particular advisory body just not a question for more of a statement I really do appreciate coming at it from to attract more people to promote we do of all colors if you can be a productive member of our society raise a family, we need it all and pay taxes like I said we are bullish on Vermont we think that Vermont can serve as a model for the rest of the nation because when we see the demographic trend happening nationwide is from urban to rural and states like Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas Minnesota upper Michigan do not have a model around which to address these issues and so we'd like to sort of position Vermont in a way that is a national leader in addressing systemic racism and reducing racial disparities because for us it's market driven in other places that may be driven by something else our point is that this is a market driven initiative that will bring more people here and that will you know increase increase our revenues I'm going to leave you with just one quick story if I might state troopers have been trained to no longer ask the question why they pulled you over okay state trooper stops you they will introduce themselves they will tell you why they pulled you over and they'll ask the all important question is there a reason for that they've shifted their their focus from being enforcers to being guardians last year there was a black visitor to the state he got this vehicle the airport drove on his way to Montpelier and I had a phone call that he needed to respond to a text message so he pulled over to the side of the road and ten minutes on the side of the road he was searching blue lights in his rear view mirror and he says oh I won't say that but this black man rolled down his window he saw a trooper down this vehicle the trooper said is everything okay this guy was like dumbfounded and again trooper said is everything okay he said yeah I saw the signs he set it up and the trooper said have a nice day and turned around and went back to his vehicle by the time this gentleman reached Montpelier he's the director of legal cities and towns and was here to visit Mara Carroll who's the Vermont executive director legal cities and towns talking about he had an encounter with law enforcement that did not assume that he was a criminal he's trying to find a country talking about Vermont and his experience here but more importantly what he did was he held his national conference in Vermont this past summer probably about two million dollars of extra revenue that came to Burlington all because of his encounter with the state trooper that exceeded his expectations around law enforcement that's what we need and that's what we hope that this panel be able to do to be able to bring that kind of ethics into other parts of government so now you're not on our list correct you're not on our list till tomorrow would you rather wait till tomorrow as opposed to follow up directly to wait, okay, I just wanted to check Lieutenant Scott from the state police alright next on the list for today I'm just going right down the list we have representation from the AG's office, the civil rights unit do we have Julio was planning on being here at 10 okay, I need to make a note of that and Mr. Hughes said 9.30 would there be an individual who was planning on talking with us today who would be able to talk with us for 10, 15 minutes I think I'm on the list okay and who was it, I heard the voice Christine yes, absolutely we had you down for tomorrow but you're in the chair right now so Christine and was it you if I recall correctly who submitted some written testimony I did and I actually resubmitted something what I submitted was a little bit that was high forward and I do have so I got to change it and I have, I think I have one or two copies that's okay, it was forwarded but I could send it this morning so thank you and I don't think I'll be long I came in the room as Chris was also by name and by position my name is Christine Longmore I lived in Burlington since somewhere in the 70s I came here with my family my dad was a IBM transplant from New York and in terms of different ways that I've served I one of the first ways that I got involved in racial justice was really in like 1982 when the KKK was coming here it was a rally in our state I think maybe somewhere in the south and a rally at City Hall happened and I think it was Phil Fermanti who pushed me out on the front of City Hall to just protest that I served as one of the co-founders of Uncommon Alliance a grassroots organization led by people of color to eliminate racial disparities in the justice system and Uncommon Alliance really you know a grassroots organization that was the impetus of the first race data collection project in traffic stops in Vermont up in the Chittenden County area I also served as the chair of the Burlington Police Commission my three year term expires in June of 2018 that's this year I participated for a year or so in the Vermont State Police's Fair and Partial Policing Committee where the Attorney General's advisory panel on racial disparities in juvenile and criminal justice system of Vermont I resigned after six months and I think this is pretty significant to this conversation and to the consideration of everybody in this room one of the reasons that I resigned is because the work really rested on volunteer work and I don't know if any of you are familiar with the charge of Act 54 but if you look at the charge it's huge and it's incredible and it's very overwhelming and really from day one my first strategy was to talk to people like Karen and ACLU and everybody I could think of just to show them the charge and say how is this going to be done so I served as chair for six months we submitted a report in the midst of some controversy about the process that we used to submit that report but I served for six months and then resigned and I think they're in the process of appointing a new chair and vice chair I also wanted to just pick up on something that I heard you asking about about similar efforts in other states in Maine there was a racial justice commission established in 2011 I'm not sure what all the details are about that but Maine has similar demographics and so I guess I'll just read the rest of it my testimony is not too long as you're hopefully aware the human rights commission is very equipped to address explicit bias and explicit bias are acts of blatant racism like cross burning or calling someone their systemic racism explicit bias and implicit bias are obviously related but there are three distinct manifestations of racism and constructs of white supremacy and I think it's really important for people to understand that I think Kurtz was talking about that a little bit but I think as you make decisions about this and as you learn about this issue and look at the details of the bill that's trying to address it that's really important to understand the difference between systemic racism, explicit bias and implicit bias they're all related but there are different manifestations of the same problem I agree with Kurtz that I think that it makes sense for us to consider it from an economic perspective but as an individual I see it more as a social and moral issue but I think that it's all related obviously we're suffering socially or morally it's going to connect to our economics as well but I think in terms of our perspective or me as an individual I see it as a social and moral issue systemic racism is responsible for deep suffering it's hard for you to understand and acknowledge because you're white and because of privilege and because of fragility and denial however those happen I'm not sure which one and our lack of adversity in the state we want I think that there's a lack of ability or willingness to understand the extent and impact of this problem and that doesn't make it less real for the people who experience it every day as public servants you're responsible for defending all the monitor's rights to live in freedom with equal opportunities and protection whether you're willing to accept it or not is the truth the truth of systemic racism is that you, me and our children are all harmed by it until we can identify, measure and improve our ability to ensure equal opportunities and employment education, healthcare, etc our state is failing in an excusable way the fact that Vermont jails have been populated for as long as I've been launching it which is like decades disproportionately by black and brown people is the result of one of two things these two possible explanations are mutually exclusive of each other black and brown people are disproportionately represented in our jails because we are inherently more criminal I hope you don't believe that or we are being unjustly arrested prosecuted and incarcerated because of our skin color and racial profiling in fact a black driver is almost four times as likely to be searched by a black driver in Vermont which gets back to Professor Saguna and Brooks's study that was just released the fact that our children are expelled from school at disproportionate rates than their white class mates is either because our children inherently have behavior problems are a lack of respect for authority or, and I hope you don't believe that our children are often responding negatively to being mistreated by the adult educators that our state pays to educate our children and who are racially bullied by class mates, neighbors and many members and this is another thing that I'm sort of picking up on in the previous conversation and I think this is really important I would ask that you guys maybe circle back with Ken Shatz and Karen Vastine of BCF they're actually doing some work to address racial disparities my former capacity as a chair of the attorney, as a advisory board on racial disparities in the juvenile and criminal justice system I've been talking about the possibility of designating black and brown children and youth in custody of DCF Woodside and adopted children as a vulnerable population and their supportive of presenting this possibility to the department of mental health and I think that's something that's really important for people to consider and I'm going to have another conversation with Karen and Ken about that I know that it's a little bit late in the game to try to add this to the bill but I think that it's worth all of us thinking about it and I think that there's an education bill that could also be appropriate to tag that on to there I think that there's information about the wages that people of color that are vermoners earn being very low and I think again black and brown and the explanation for that is either that black and brown vermoners are lacking in professional capabilities I hope you don't believe that or because we don't get higher promoted at a rate equal to our similarly quantified white coworkers and I think I just made another reference to the information that Professor Silvino and Professor Brooks have put out there and I would again encourage you to read that report it's called The Deeper Dive into Racial Disparities and Policing in Vermont and you know as the questions were asked and I know that Curtis is a big fan of Vermont State Police and I am in a lot of ways too I think that what we have is a model that we can look at but I think that's very different than looking at the results that data collection is really showing us and it's still showing that we have a problem I think it's also really significant to note that there are at least 79 plus police agencies around the state that are required by law to be collecting that data and I don't think that they are which is pretty significant I mean if it's mandated by law and these police organizations are not doing that I think that that's cause for concern I also would like to just bring your attention to the fact that there is a lot of information out there that really puts experiencing racism and linking it to PTSD there's an article entitled the link between racism and PTSD in psychology today it was published in 2015 I'm just going to read a little bit of it psychologists explains race-based stress and trauma in black Americans it's important to understand that race-based stress and trauma extends beyond the direct behaviors of prejudiced individuals we are surrounded by constant reminders that race-related danger can occur at any time anywhere to anyone you might see clips on the light of the news featuring unarmed African Americans being killed on the street in a holding cell or even in a church learning of these events brings up an array of painful racially charged memories and what has been turned by carious traumatization even if the specific tragic news items has never happened to us directly we've had parents or aunts who have had similar experience or we know people in our community who have and their stories have been passed down over the centuries the black community has developed a cultural knowledge of these sorts of horrific events which then primes us for the traumatization when we hear about yet another act of violence another unarmed black man being has been shot by police in our communities and nowhere feels safe and it goes on there's a little bit more there but I just think that it's really important for people to understand that that's a real piece of our experience the issue of systemic racism in Vermont is widespread it has been documented it causes destruction and suffering beyond what any of you I can imagine will ever understand we have a potential model to address systemic racism in the work of the Vermont State Police and their commitment to fair and partial policing with race traffic stop data, analyzation and review again you know it's a model that I think can be used in other places in state government but it's also really important to pause and understand that that model is still putting out information that reveals that there are racial disparities in policing so let's not celebrate too quick 50 years ago today when I was three years old actually I guess is it today it's either today or tomorrow Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and I wonder how any of you as parents would have explained to your children why a great man like Dr. King was killed what we have to tell our children is racism is real it's wrong and even when you experience it you still have to respect your teachers adults, your white classmates, your neighbors store owners and institutions you have to navigate in order to be successful in our society above all don't respect the police do whatever they tell you to do because it can be a matter of life and death you have a duty as public servants to work diligently for the protection of rights of non-rightly mourners and non-rightly mourners you have a duty to hold individuals accountable for their own role in systemic racism in the agencies and organizations that employ them a failure to do this with a sense of urgency is a neglect of your sworn duty as elected officials thank you for your service to the state thank you any questions? Christine? I also do think that it's important to have systemic racism in the title I know there's been a lot of different conversations about that but that's what the bill is intended to address and I think that even down the road as the work goes on there's no people come in and people are trying to learn about the work of that body that it should just be called what it is thank you committee, no questions? okay, thanks very much and it's a little past 9.30 but Mr. Hughes has arrived if you're if you've had a chance to catch your breath would you like to take a little Mr. Chair please? I live in Cabot in this mud season and I have two Petri dishes that I had to take to school so I'm a phone dump so that I can go on and on but thank you for the record Mark Hughes as I fumble around I think I have some notes and you are representing which of the groups that wanted to speak with us I am the executive director and co-founder of Justice for All the anchor of the racial justice reform coalition who put this bill forward thank you for providing me an opportunity to speak on S281 today in spite of all the adversity getting here, I'm glad I'm here the bill is a very important bill that addresses systemic racism I'm an Iowa native I'm a resident I'm Vermont now for the last 9 years and I'm a retired Army officer cyber security expert a father, a grandfather I'm an ordained minister in the Baptist faith I'm a member I'm a former executive board as well as chaplain of the American Legion here post 3 in my pillar I'm also a member of the Veterans of Foreign War and also Veterans for Peace there's a board that I serve on with the rights of democracy called C4 there's a position that I hold as the trichair of the poor people's campaign a national call for a moral revival I'm a former co-chair in racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel I've also served as a Vermont Democratic Party affirmative action chair also formerly the Cabot Town Chair and also a member of the platform committee that would be the Democratic Party formerly I'm the co-founder and executive director of justice for all as I've said this is a racial justice organization with a mission to pursue racial justice within Vermont criminal justice system through advocacy, education and relationship building justice for all is a member organization of the state police, fair and impartial policing committee we also worked with the fair and impartial policing committee since 2015 and we've served on the law enforcement professional regulation summer study which was foundational step in moving the law enforcement towards professional regulation as you might recall I believe that's S193 last year we formed a racial justice reform coalition of 30 organizations in those 30 organizations moved forward we introduced was then H492 H492 culminated in what you know and now understand is act 54 and it's this coalition anchored by justice for all it's us who brought S281 to your attention and we did the same thing with H868 it's right there on the board over there it's sister bill and the first person we talked to about that was your own representative Warren Kitzmiller first one to bring that one to the legislative council and open the door for it to come into the house I wanted to share some very important thoughts today on systemic racism and contrast a little bit to overt racism as well and doing so what we can do is maybe shine a little bit of light based upon the testimony that I witnessed yesterday after introduction and initial testimony yesterday I thought it was really necessary to hit the reset button on my testimony it seems that there is a discussion and some background on what it is that we're trying to do surrounding systemic racism I think it would be fair to the committee if allowed to do so to provide some of that background information I'll do that I'll also share with you if allowed the intent of the bill as well as some current concerns I think opening the discussion without going into any interest of time without going into specific details there are a lot of terms that are flying around one is disparities one is systemic one is implicit bias one is explicit bias there's a term called equity there's one called equality so there's a lot of language there I didn't come to give you all of those definitions I'm glad to provide some to you at a later time but I think that as we negotiate ourselves our way through this endeavor I think it's important that we are able to delineate in our discussions the difference between overt racism or explicit racism as opposed to implicit which is systemic which is what we're talking about here there's been a lot of discussions and they feed into one another for years we've been talking about racial disparities but at some point or another we'll need to have the conversation about where they come from racial disparities so first I'd like to respond to one of the questions that was asked yesterday which was a very poignant question and I think it cuts to the root of everything that we're talking about there was a committee member I don't know who it was but I think it might have been representative we had said can you give us one example of systemic racism when co-trustee was on the stand yesterday everyone recall that discussion and he did give an example and I think that the example that he gave was a pretty good one but I think that I'd like to say the criminal justice system is a very good example where systemic racism resides at 134 2012 racial disparities in the criminal in the criminal justice system was the title of this legislation racial disparities in the criminal justice system and it called our attention to the prison system with 10% of its population being African American this legislation called our attention to that six years ago okay um while only one percent of the general population of the state is of that particular demographic a look at what we chose to do about racial disparities in the criminal justice system will not only clearly define systemic racism but I believe it will also illuminate what are likely some of the only real solutions that we have to address it the original intent at 134 was to quote address racial disparities okay across the entire criminal justice system it addressed race in sentencing and incarceration it also addressed law enforcement, race data collection fair and impartial policing policy it addressed implicit bias training introduced all of these things by the way a complaint reporting process as well as all the other criminal justice system professionals okay what came later was Act 193 in 2014 and Act 147 in 2016 which walked back to scope to encompass law enforcement only and intensified the focus on race data collection the evolving of the fair and impartial policing policy and the commitment to um implicit bias training and that is essentially where we've been since the department of justice and the president of the chiefs of police association publicly acknowledged systemic racism in the criminal justice system during the previous administration the department of justice has implemented the same strategies and addressed the systemic racism in educational institutions law enforcement agencies cities and towns across the nation as well as 28,000 law enforcement officers and 5800 prosecutors in training okay and as well as across the nation we began the work that is needed to address systemic racism we've already began this work with the tools of data collection fair and impartial policing policy as well as implicit bias training we discovered last year that all 74 agencies are reporting racial disparities in their race data collection I just want to just contradict slightly what the previous testimony indicated there all 79 agencies have collected data the question is where is it and if anyone around the table knows feel free to let me know it's on their crime research group website very three clicks down in 79 spreadsheets but we'll come back to that all of these 79 agencies are reporting racial disparities in their race collection by title 20 23 66 and which also mandated fair and impartial policing policy all agencies have been legislatively mandated to undergo implicit bias training at various levels as well but if systemic racism is systemic if it's really systemic then it must be pervasive throughout all systems by definition for the first time in history last year at 54 acknowledged systemic racism across all systems of the government to include the criminal justice system although the request which was H 492 was partially although the request in H 492 was partially which is partially before you in the form of S 281 as well as what you have on the wall there 868 the legislature asked for more reports and kicked the can down the road on fair and impartial policing policy last year the report from at 54 task force was released last year it's a story for another testimony but the last report that I'll mention is the chair and the vice-chair who's myself the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel released a report as well it speaks for itself and it epitomizes systemic racism in the criminal and juvenile justice system which is why we both offered our resignations largely implicit bias is at the root of systemic racism because bias informs decisions and decisions have they drive actions and policies which in turn impact people it would be nice if the whole thing was as simple but intertwined and all this is also explicit bias and while the whole business because this is a really messy disentanglement to handle the whole business of explicit bias is handled by our director of the human rights commission it's my hope that they would be adequately funded in staff to continue their statutorily mandated work obviously it is probably more important now than ever moving on to the bill itself you'll recall the senator Calamore as he testified yesterday he indicated that 12 senators voted for an amendment that would have removed the mandate for people of color to be present on the panel that address that addresses systemic racism and I hope he you know shed some light on that and why it was important but I thought it was also important to let you know that 11 of those 11 of those 11 of those 12 actually voted in favor of act 54 the 12th one senator broce was absent history has taught us if systemic racism exists then it exists everywhere and that means in all systems housing education employment health services access economic development the legislative research we provided to you and I did send over to everyone on this committee a link that takes you to the legislative research which is the foundation and premise of this entire piece of legislation okay and I would be happy to resend your difference if there are those at the table who have not seen that the legislative research we provided it outlives the existence of systemic and overt racism on the statewide and the national and as well as the global level the research it regurgitates the numerous reports upwards of a dozen outlining systemic and overt racism in Vermont and beyond so what is the problem national civil liberties are rapidly trending downward numerous reports many recent are providing indicators there the data continue to indicate a continuation of Vermont's poor performance in providing equity the Vermont Human Rights Commission is neither staff nor funded sufficiently got to ensure that the state immediately takes steps to address this all Vermonters should have equal protection and equal opportunity there must be a state agency with sole responsibility for managing a program to address systemic racism in Vermont systemic racism must be acknowledged and addressed as an issue so important that the approaches should be designed to specifically and purposely address it and the data once again are overwhelming and the need to collect any additional it seems like analysis paralysis the original intent of the coalition the bill was to implement an independent funded commission to address systemic racism to address explicit and explicit hot spots that means like racial profiling it was also intended to expand the HRC add a couple positions there separation of roles predetermination settlements and so forth what you see before you in S281 is because of the processes in the senate we weren't able to meet the timeline and getting the complete version of the coalition's iteration of the amendment and the amendment was refused to be taken up by the committee and government operations in the senate it never saw the light of day when 868 arrived in the house it first went to judiciary as you know and was not taken up at the recommendation of Kevin coach Christy it came to you it remains on that board and the provisions which were buried in the other gov ops remain buried in this gov ops what we were really trying to articulate we highly encourage you to look at it to compare it to what it is that we are doing you may reference to an amendment is the amendment essentially H868 or what is the amendment that you said was not dealt with if I understand the question correctly you are asking me is H68 essentially the amendment and I would say no and the reason why I would say that is because I'm getting it how about this yes this is an interesting discussion so there are two separate bodies so there are two separate versions of the bill that were presented what made it in the house what made it in the senate was the original bill as proposed by senator ingram before any amendment was applied so the vast majority of H868 is contained within the amendment that never saw the light of day in the senate however when we placed it into the house what we were trying to get done was articulated in H868 with the exception of provisions that are outlined surrounding the HRC does that make it clear of the mud should we impact that anymore here are recommendations recommendations from a very high level is explicitly include our education system as a part of the charge first of all explicitly include our education system somewhere along the way it fell off the radar I understand with 794 there's a few other things that are happening that are kind of hokey so I have to keep an eye on that and so when you say education system you mean the pre-k through 12 system out in the local community starting with the as I understand the former secretary Rebecca Holcomb stepped down last week so we have an education component within this government so everything that it touches upon we should be addressing in this so that did answer your question ensuring that the systemic racism mitigation officer the promulgation authority and the timelines for data collection policy and training are clear this is important a conversation an e-mail exchange with Senator McCormick brought this out in a conversation, an hour long conversation with Senator Brock brought this out as well it also came out in discussions yesterday there needs to be crystal clarity in exactly what this position is doing that doesn't exist yet okay and you should be concerned if we move this thing forward in its current state if you're placing a person out there with independent authority that's funded and it's not crystal clear then we're setting ourselves up for a recipe for disaster that clarity is defined in 868 that clarity is defined in 868 ensuring that the data collection policy training requirements and timelines are thoroughly communicated in other words if this entity is going to be establishing policy training data collection and most importantly in infrastructure that supports data collection for statewide race-based data because it's not there and it's not budgeted, it's not funded and it's not being talked about but all of this stuff these timelines and rolling this thing out they need to be established there are expectations of this position and if there are expectations of the agencies they need to be very clearly defined in this legislation as we roll it out they are defined in 868 ensure that the resource the systemic racism I forgot what we even call this guy the systemic racism mitigation officer I'm calling it systemic racism mitigation officer is because I do not want to call it a civil rights officer because it confuses explicit from implicit bias responsibilities and it really just casts a shadow over everything we're doing because it looks like out of the gate we don't even know what the hell we're doing here and it fails to communicate with the purpose of this role but ensuring that the SRM officer legislative and executive review authority let's just talk just a minute about legislative and executive policy review authority this role is not just about data information this role is not just about we envision this role not just also not to be about policy or training we also envision this role as we said to be very much about getting to the root of what is creating this system and what is sustaining this system and that is the development and the sustainment of these policies when something comes out of this committee and before it's voted out in any other committee under this golden dome when something comes out of our governor's office we need eyes on that creating policies that contribute to the perpetuation of systemic racism what are we doing so this role would have that responsibility okay here's some very important quotes of specific recommendations I agree about the title we spent a lot of time thinking about it and decided that no matter what we came up with we would be it would be undone in the house so we simply left the word civil rights and we'll let them know we hope they can come up with something better Senator White government operations chair Mark could you hang on one second Jim just had a question I'm sorry step back five seconds you talked about reviewing legislation and I'm trying to understand in the context of the bill that you envision this as sort of a watchdog on what we have or advance for legislation or a watchdog on us as legislators in our own individual actions the original intent was the former however you bring a very good point because that is a conversation that we need to have in terms of disagreement but we run into some potential institutional issues of separation of branches of government and who will elect I mean I got unelected you got unelected on the news it was really nice how you said that there was the news that unelected you well another legislator got the wrong caption and sort of put them in my district did that answer your question? yeah so just to be clear on the answer is that the original intent was watchdog as it may whatever you want to call it this is advisory this is not a veto authority it's advisory in capacity but it is an oversight an oversight is missing in a lot of what we do to include the system that we tout so I appreciate we get input from all sectors and then some sometimes but as I look across to Karen everybody else is it the human rights commission often times will weigh in different issues that so I'm wondering is this duplicative or is there a sense that because they don't have a big enough budget they can't do justice to watching some of these issues and then on the other side we have the attorney general's office that have a civil rights division and they're also letting us know if they think we're going astray sometimes and it's all advisory we get to do what we get to do and then the courts decide if we overstepped our bounds somewhere and I think if I understand your question is this duplicity are we creating something that already exists that's part of my question and could some of this you mentioned earlier about budgetary issues and pressures none of us get to sit down across the hall where some of those decisions are made but this bill calls for initially a part year appropriation but then it's expanded it's probably going to be 150,000 or 200,000 or more down the road annually would that money be better spent expanding the role or making up the human rights commission for example thank you so to the first part of your question I understand the overlap and part of my testimony does cover the HRC I understand the overlap of the HRC and the attorney general's office as it pertains to systemic racism mitigation not just the policy review but all aspects it's kind of piecemeal and the best analogy I'll give you is a computer security chief security officer of a four billion dollar corporation when I first walked in the door they asked me I asked them who's in charge of security and they said everybody but at the end of the day nothing was getting done neck and choke and there was also somebody who was accountable with a specific responsibility for driving that it was just that important okay and I think this is far more important than that now to the second part of your question when we start talking about budgetary again it's just that important how much money has this state spent on racial justice in the last whatever thousand dollars period that was the report that came out of act 2012 we had the intestinal fortitude to stand up on the other chamber and we acquired $150,000 for what it is that we're doing now and I believe we need 10 times that much and I think it's a crying shame as we talk about systemic racism and what is created in America and where it's come from and how it feeds into poverty and how it fuels wealth in this nation that we're going to sit around this table and talk about money okay so I think if we don't have the money we should find it because it's time I hope that answers your question sir no I I appreciate this so it's your sentiment so I think I understand where you're coming from so here's some a couple of other things and I'll just move on but I support rigorous examination of institutionalized racism in Vermont state government I do think S-281 would be improved by clearer definition of exactly what we're looking for Senator Dick McCormick okay why would we not explicitly include education as part of this ensuring that the officer of the promulgation of the authority and the timelines of the data collection and all that stuff articulated more clearly and ensuring that agency and data collection policy training requirements and timelines are thoroughly communicated and that the the officer the officer's responsibility for legislative and executive review are clearly articulated here's one more we are fortunate that some data is available to be disaggregated by race for example with home ownership 71% of white households in Vermont own homes whereas 17% of black Vermont households own homes a rate lower than all the three states CVOEO supports creating a centralized platform for race-based data collection and overseeing its collection and dissemination along with other facets of S-281 Kate LaRose, director of financial futures program Champlain Valley Office of Economic Development as a statewide organizer and community liaison of ACLU I've seen wide support for initiatives to advance racial justice but white constituents by white constituents it strikes me that right now is an important moment to take advantage of the energy and momentum for addressing racism as it manifests in Vermont Niko Amador ACLU and I'll just skip the rest of it I'm skipping over recommendations from Jim Condos and Beth Pierce they may just come in and testify themselves if necessary I'll be glad to send those to you personally the community has some serious work to do Madam Chair and some tough questions to answer one of the first questions that I propose that you deliberate is this do you believe that systemic racism exists? I thought to ask Senator Brock that question in an hour long discussion in his response was although he did he was not sure that it existed in Vermont state government I respect him for his transparency and the decency at least to allow me to understand his deeply held conviction if these are the debates that must yet continue in this chamber then let them continue but let us not allow the process to be undermined by accepting the notion that this panel that we're trying to put together would be a new breeding ground for debate for these types of questions I implore you let's have those debates here let's not set that panel up for failure this is the first time in state history that there's been that we've directly addressed systemic racism with legislative action of any form this is the first time that we've addressed systemic racism with legislative action so here's a couple things I'll just leave you with is why is it if that's the case if this is such a historic moment why is it that there's such limited coverage in the media why is it that Orca that camera right there is the only one covering this at my request why? only camera in the room I hope you're here for the entire thing who do you represent? I'm with Digger oh and you are? I'm Xander why is it that Digger put out a horrible article last week about the coverage from far covering the debate on whether or not black people should be placed on this panel as opposed to covering the historic nature of this and Galloway has my email already so there are issues I'm glad you're here you brought something else up the point is is that the coverage is poor and this is historic why? there's a couple of clarifying tidbits that I want to share with you on the HRC okay I'd like to offer having heard the testimony yesterday because a couple things just need to be set straight on the testimony that you heard yesterday first of all the HRC is an independent organization that does not serve the director does not serve at the pleasure of the governor someone was asking around the table yesterday if other agencies exist this is one secondly the HRC protects all civil liberties of all protected categories across the state and I'm sure as Karen Richards comes to testify she'll tell you the same and this responsibility is explicit and overt things that impinge on civil liberties that are explicit and overt the HRC has a responsibility for all constructs with the exception of public employment as well as hate crimes in the state that's all constructs and the HRC's language Title 9141 it mandates that there will be a person of color the statute mandates that there will be a person of color on the HRC ok so this is clarification from what we heard yesterday because it was just not necessarily so ok and also just for clarity there has been an an african-american serving on the HRC up until the time that coach was appointed and her name is Dawn Ellis so that was also incorrect so that being said I implore you to take a look at age 68 and I ask that you would take the responsibility that you have before you in this historic moment in addressing this S-281 with a serious gravity I thank you so much for making this a priority this it's very very clear that this is very important to all of you and so I know it's a no-joke moment for all of you I thank you for taking S-281 up and I am open to any questions that you might have first of all I do appreciate your passion I heard that a lot passion is good we all come at things from a different lens I appreciate your passion background justice for all you said you were a co-founder if you type into the computer justice for all a variety of organizations come up in different areas is it part of a national group is it solely a Vermont group with no affiliates around the country it's an interesting story because the group was actually started here as a local group and I woke up I told you I was a computer security expert I woke up in 2014 so I made myself an expert over the last four years and it was in conjunction with an 8th generation Vermont the other co-founders 8th generation white Vermont we are local okay but it's not affiliated with any national or international there are others I saw others and one is very scary so I appreciate you tearing that up we're not against abortion thank you for that background sure and just at the end you talked about historic historic because this would be the first such person set up within state government or commission or board earlier the previous witness talked about Maine and I'm not sure what exactly they did so any comments on that if your question is directed at what's going on outside of the state we haven't nothing has really come across our radar that rises to this level but our resources are so limited so our research capacity is really not sufficient to adequately answer that question however we can look in Vermont you may write me down in history oh it was the google icon I was trying to find the main the video so the answer is the historic aspect that I was referring to is the fact that here in our state we have yet to take these types of steps as much as we've tried over the last couple of years that was for my clarification thank you other questions from the page Mark, so I've been reading this since 1968 and 1968 doesn't create a separate panel it puts most of the functions in the human it puts all of the functions in the HRC which is where we got blindsided again because again we have no ability to deal directly with the legislative console this was the let me just finish that story so this was our there are timelines in the house just as you know as there were in the Senate and this is where the timeline cut off Representative Kitzmiller would probably be glad to explain that to you and I think what happened was the timeline expired as we were able to add the remainder of our comments now there's a 7 point which Representative Kitzmiller is in possession of a 7 point review that we provided to this particular bill glad to provide it to the entire committee and at the top of that list we'll move it from the HRC okay and oh by the way what's also not in there is I think it may be in that 7 point list is that we believe that the HRC should have an additional litigator we believe that whether this is done or not if this dies and never makes it out of committee we still believe that the HRC should have another litigator and also an outreach coordinator about a discussion just a quick one you have written testimony there did you provide that to us on the committee page okay I just wanted to know if your testimony was on the committee page oh I will be glad to provide it I don't think I've submitted that not that one you don't I'll be glad to provide that testimony and more and more it's hard to get everything done thank you thank you at this point in time Madam Chair thank you so much for having me today so committee I promised you a break at 10 however I learned same time you learned that Mr. Thompson expected to testify at 10 o'clock so if you would like to take the seat please and after Mr. Thompson's if we could take 5 minute break and then Ms. Wall I was just going to ask because I can't come tomorrow I understand I've had 2 notes on your behalf oh my gosh after 5 minute break committee if we could get focused we've got Mr. Thompson who's kind enough to let you have a break thank you thank you that's right you can leave it there we like whatever you're going to say okay okay check we don't have K-phone yes okay so Mr. Thompson if you would identify yourself for the record please and proceed thank you good morning Madam Chair my name's Julio Thompson I'm Attorney General and the Director of the Attorney General's Civil Rights Unit with the new office I don't know many of your committee members I don't testify this is my first time testifying before this committee so I'm going to give you a little background about myself and about our Civil Rights Unit and some of the things that we do so that some of the comments I'm going to offer today will be in the proper context I think under state law we've already heard from prior witnesses the Attorney General's office has the authority to investigate and enforce bias motivated crimes those are not just race based they're based on unsex, sexual orientation gender identity, national origin, religion we can prosecute those criminally we can pursue civil remedies including injunctions to keep the parties away from the government we also have authority to enforce the state's fair employment practices laws for all employers and businesses in the state of Vermont except for the state of Vermont because by statute the Attorney General's office is essentially the law firm for the state the authority is delegated to the Human Rights Commission so we investigate on daily basis claims of discrimination based upon the categories including race but certainly not limited to race we also enforce state leaves law parental family leave we enforce the state drug testing law military leave law and a number of other laws that relate to fair employment practices in addition and this has been especially so in the last year plus our office with our head appellate unit our solicitor general is our chief appellate lawyer we've been involved in constitutional litigation nationwide a lot of them relating to things that you've heard about for example last week our office submitted with a group of states Supreme Court brief in connection with the so called travel ban challenge that would be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court next month there have been three separate champs and so far two successful challenges travel bans that were subject to the executive orders by the Trump administration and we've been challenging those from the very beginning yesterday we joined a federal lawsuit in the southern district of New York challenging proposed inclusion of citizenship questions on the U.S. census and I and the solicitor general had a record for the state of mind on that last fall actually was the day after labor day the solicitor general and I again became counsel of record in a multi-state challenge to the rescission of the DACA program which in connection with a California challenge obtained a preliminary injunction you may recall President Trump said that he would terminate DACA as of Mar-J unless it was a corrupt congressional compromise but our legal challenge as California's separate legal challenge have kept the DACA program in place by court order and that litigation is still ongoing we've also joined in briefs opposing the president's orders regarding transgender members in the military on equal protection grounds and the prior attorney general I and the prior solicitor general filed a briefs in both the defense of marriage act and the marriage equality cases right before the Supreme Court we've also joined in briefs supporting affirmative action programs that were implemented by the University of Texas there were two Supreme Court cases where the court ultimately found our arguments and other states arguments meritorious on how to implement an affirmative action program lawfully I mentioned all of those legal challenges because many of them involve issues of equal protection under the laws under the 14th Amendment so that is a field that the solicitor general and I spent a lot of time in and I think S81 in a lot of senses really addresses or seeks a form of self-examination and targeted improvement performance to provide equal protection under the laws both in terms of state employment but also in terms of administration of justice access to state benefits and so forth our office, the attorney general's office fully supports any efforts by any entity whether that's a private business a town or a city, a county or a state to engage in self-examination to find out whether they're complying with equal protection whether they're administering themselves fairly both in employment and how they do business so we fully support that there are many ways to do that and our office isn't here and I'm not here really to propose the one best way to do that I don't I'm not aware of another state that has adopted a model that's proposed in the S81 but that's no comment on the merits of it, it's just that I don't, I'm not aware of another example what I'd like to talk about today are some of the because our office again is a law firm for the state of Vermont and if this were enacted the enforcement or the implementation of law would be something that our office may have some involvement in I want to talk about some of the legal issues presented by the law and also some areas where I think the committee or the legislature needs to I think develop some attention because I think looking at this bill in terms of how this would actually operate I think we see some issues that may come up that you may want to address now and I think prior witnesses may have already mentioned some of those so before I dig in I just want to give a brief outline of what those issues are so we know where we're going first I'm going to talk about equal protection concerns that are presented by the provisions in this bill to appoint this advisory panel second I'm going to talk about some separation of powers issues that arise in this bill as it relates to the creation of the panel and the appointment of removal powers with respect to this I think it's referred to as a cabinet level chief civil rights officer I'm then going to talk about some of the legal and privacy issues that are presented by the proposed subpoena power for the chief civil rights officer related to that I'm going to talk about the absence of any provision here about the privacy of papers or working papers or exemptions from the public records act for materials that are obtained either by the advisory committee or the chief civil rights officer at least as this bill is currently drafted they may obtain information that is protected by law from other agencies and the question becomes do those materials lose their protection because they're now in possession of a different agency and that's not really addressed here I think that there are some questions that we would present or we think that should be addressed about what it means to obtain race I think the term is race-based data just to ensure we all know what we're talking about and talk about some of the issues that may arise there with collecting data which in the types of data and the sources of the data isn't really specified and finally I'll talk about just some practical operational questions that we have that I think are presented by some of the language in the bill which seems rather broad and I think could be subject to different interpretations so let me start with the equal protection issue and I guess I saw reference in the newspaper articles I was not involved in any of the senate testimony or or the floor votes or discussions of the bill in the senate no one came to us to ask us our view about at least as far as I'm aware but page 3 of the bill in subsection E2 talks about E sub 2 line 3 states that at least 3 members of this advisory panel shall be persons of color shall be persons of color that 3 of the members shall be persons of color so that's 3 of 5 members under the on the statute would be persons of color and constitutional law that's just called a racial quota racial quotas have been consistently held to be unconstitutional since 1978 there was a case decided that year called Baki versus the Regents of the University of California where UC Davis Medical School set aside 16 out of 100 students slots for racial minorities and a white student who unsuccessfully applied for the school Ronald Baki challenge and equal protection grounds and he prevailed since 1978 the Supreme Court has taken roughly a dozen cases involving racial preferences and over that period of time has kind of sharpened and refined it's about when race may be taken into account for government action and one thing that and we can talk about that is about what the courts found to be permissible but consistently since 1978 the Supreme Court has said that a plain quota is not permissible and that was as recent as 2016 in the Fisher case the Supreme Court reiterated that I'm sorry there was just we can confirm that I had seen first Dennis and then Jim question on this constitutionality so having lunch with Senator Brock yesterday he had asked that he could testify before our committee about his amendment which was supported by him and Senator Brooks did try to remove the three of five members on the board so I think they were familiar with the constitutional piece yet it stayed in and his amendment was defeated so you're saying sorry anyway I'm not aware of a case and we've just started looking at this I'm not aware of a case where a preference of set aside on a state or government panel has been called we identified two cases one in 1995 one in 1996 cases out of Florida and Indiana where there was state statutes that said for a seven member judicial nominating committee that one of the members had to be a minority member in both cases a non-successful non-minority candidate challenged the law and prevailed in 2016 there was a legal challenge to a Texas law that held that one out of well it may have been more members actually several members out of a state the state bar of commission that licenses attorneys would have to be a racial or ethnic minority and that was legally challenged during the course on the same grounds before the court issued a ruling Texas just amended the law to strike that language so the only reason it didn't get removed out of the Senate is because they didn't I'm not sure no one contacted our office I haven't read the floor amendment I just know that the language is in the bill and that's what I wanted to address here how does this compare to provisions that colleges may have for example in terms of admission where they might give a referential treatment everything helps be unequal sure so actually my law school alma mater University of Michigan was a subject I am a Wolverine Indian I didn't watch the game I didn't watch the game I didn't watch the game I'm not sure what I'm not sure what I'm not sure what I'm not sure what anyway in 2003 there were two separate challenges to the law school's admission process they used to have a process where if a person belonged to a particular identified group racial minority but also could be an ethnic group were identified that they were given automatic points and they had a point system so if you were Asian you got X number of points and then at the end of the day you got X number of things but that sort of automatic point system was deemed by the court to be unconstitutional it had at the time of the legal challenge it had dropped the point system and just said that will consider raised as part of many other factors including social disadvantage whether the person where the person grew up in some cases and I had classmates like this and single parent homes are raised by their grandparents and basically acted as a parent for their kids so it was a much more individualized consideration and race was also part of the factor but part of the factors that were considered and in some cases it was considered to be a positive factor but there wasn't a formula and the supreme court said yes you can do that diversity is a value that a state can have interest diversity to get diverse views this was in an educational context so that can be legitimate government interest but the constitution requires that the mechanism has to be narrowly drawn so as to to avoid just these basic quotas and so the University of Michigan had a program the University of Texas in 2016 had a separate program again it was kind of I think the court described it as a factor of a factor so there were lots of issues that were taken and there were data in those cases showing that there were students who got in maybe they had lower test scores but they weren't racial minorities but they had other circumstances that added to the diversity of the body so there are means to achieve diversity and in fact the constitutional standard before you get to something that looks like a quota there has to be a factual record that other means would not be effective that would be a little challenging here because this advisory panel has never existed before so there's no track record but you basically have to show that encouraging people to apply and considering people that involvement in racial justice that you couldn't get diversity on the board but the case law is pretty clear what you can't do is set a number and then individuals can't compete for those provisions that's something that the court and in the Fisher case all of the argument was about whether Texas's admissions program was far away enough from an illegal quota so I don't think that there was really even an argument about quotas anymore in the court and I think that's something that has to be addressed here it can be addressed but either if in statute or in practice there's just like this is the minority seat that's susceptible to a constitutional challenge so those would be equal protection issues if there are no questions about that I'll move on to the other point two so point two really has to do with separation of powers issues this is the construct here is different than the human rights commission where the governor appoints members of the human rights commission who then appoints the executive director in this case there's a creation of a cabinet low provision position in the governor's office essentially where the governor has only one vote on the appointment of that individual and there are obligations here for state agencies to comply with the executive officers the principal duties is to report to the legislature and not the donor so I think that we always look in terms of whether there are laws that intrude upon the executive discretion and having a cabinet level position essentially majority involvement are from people that are not answerable to the executive could create a potential separation of powers issue and there are means to address that the human rights commission I've been in Vermont for 13 years I've never had cases before the human rights commission I work with them now I've never had any issues about their impartiality or subject to political you know thumbs on the scales so to speak so I don't know why that mechanism wouldn't work but there might be other ones at the committee saying described here I think presents some problems or potential separation of powers problems before you any questions from you understand and it would be helpful maybe when he cites it he gives us the page or the section or something like you did with the first one there I'm not sure it's it's pages 2 and 3 of the bill that deal with the rights advisory panel and as it's written here the only person who can remove this cabinet level position is the panel the governor can't remove a member of his own cabinet which it's not all I'm not sure we've encountered that before the third issue I wanted to talk about I'm sorry with respect to the panel so is the issue the panel to remove the chief civil rights officer the separation powers issue just to well I think there are two related issues the principal ones are that the panel appoints the officer and only can remove the officer and to the the panel has some duties that are described in the bill and are entitled to per game compensation without without and I think there are obligations to for other agencies to work with that panel I think those are kind of second order separation of powers issues but that you know the foot I mean when I think about you know like a panel and an executive officer my thoughts go to the human rights commission that's kind of a model that I think doesn't really separate separation of powers and so if the panel was appointed by the governor would that eliminate the power that would that would eliminate that separation of powers issue relating to the appointment of the executive I think so I don't think that I'm not aware of any like separation of powers challenger issues that have come up with the human rights commission acting the executive director so I don't third area I'd like to talk about which I think is quite significant is the subpoena power that's given to the civil rights officer this is really I would say for an unelected official or a non-constitutional officer this is a really novel and unusual power to give the subpoena power our office has a subpoena power as is the human rights commission and certain other portions of state government all of those are in connection with either with a statutory mandate like the auditor as a constitutional officer can review financial statements our subpoena power is limited to cases where we could show a court if necessary evidence of wrongdoing we could not for example even though we enforce discrimination laws in the private sector we could not subpoena best by and say let us take a look at your workplace and see if there's any racial discrimination there we would have to have evidence going forward even to have them respond to us to an administrative complaint that there is already misconduct occurring there's also kind of a practical it's kind of an unanswered question I'm not really sure how it works operationally right now if the state of Vermont has started with the subpoena the attorney general's office represents that and reviews of subpoena to find out whether it's legally justified whether it presents privacy concerns whether it's over broad and burdensome and might need to be narrowed by court I'm not really sure what would happen here if the chief civil rights officer in the statute was not necessarily an attorney subpoenaed let's say fish and wildlife and wanted to look at their records the AG's office would review that on behalf of fish and wildlife because that's our statutory duty but if there were a dispute about complying I'm not sure who would represent the civil rights officer related to that is that the subpoena power is incredibly broad and at least on its face seems to wipe away any confidentiality provisions at least potentially this is on page one section B it's under the powers and duties of the chief civil rights officer it says that the cabinet shall provide the chief with access to all relevant records so one we don't know what the chief civil rights officers would consider to be relevant records but theoretically if he or she were looking at records related to how the state administers juvenile justice mental health how it prosecutes cases there may be all sorts of confidentiality the department of children and families that would be protected by state statute and the question here is whether all access means that notwithstanding all of those statutory confidentiality the panel mentioned the chief civil rights officer would have access to that I'm not sure whether it overrides the attorney client privilege we've got three questions we've got Rob and Dennis and Jim thank you I'm just in layman's terms here the subpoena powers what level does it have to rise up to be able to consider okay to subpoena probable cause or is there other criteria that there's a practical matter yet probable cause in court in some instances depending on the nature what the charges it might be of lower level reasonable suspicion you have to be able to show some evidence I think there was actually many years ago a question about the scope of the subpoena powers for the attorney general's office it's very clear that statutes can't authorize anyone to just have a you know a phishing expedition sort of thing you need to have evidence of misconduct I think here it's I think it's fine to have language that would say that you know agencies that work collaboratively won't provide access to records but it's another thing to say that the executive officer would just put the commissioner of corrections under oath and require them to turn over all records relating to certain offenders and maybe medical information in there whether people are HIV positive or mental health I mean and I think that I think that would probably draw some opposition from the department of corrections and so I mention it because I think it would be it's and and just structurally it has to do with the subject matter for civil rights at all but I think giving anyone that level of subpoena power is potentially could be susceptible to abuse if they determine what's relevant what's not any other questions on page six it talks about subpoena yeah the whole section quite a few places is there another word that would work instead of subpoena and if they wanted subpoena then they would be requesting and they would appeal to the attorney general's office to your office to get involved with subpoena or would it not happen so I think there are three questions there and I think I'll take the easiest one I don't think the statute has any mechanism for the attorney general's office to issue a subpoena and that would make sense because the attorney general's office represents the recipient of a subpoena so you have a difficult situation where one assistant attorney general might conceivably be in court against another lawyers in the same law firm arguing both sides of a subpoena so this provides that the officer himself or herself would issue the subpoena that's the easy question the real underlying question just fundamentally is do you give this person the right to compel under legal process for people to testify under oath and to produce all relevant records I can tell you now it's a practical matter if state agency one is doing something and that state agency two has information relating to that there's no subpoena involved it's simply secretary to secretary typically through the secretary of administration and I'm not aware of it it's possible that but I'm not aware of state agency two which answers to the governor telling state agency one pound sand so I'm not sure how or why it would be necessary to do that when the responding agencies are all responding to the executive so if there's language here about working collaboratively providing data I think that's probably sufficient but I think that the power of a subpoena that's us and government is typically a prosecutor's weapon and we use it very judiciously and under our statutes and case law the courts are very narrow or very careful about how you compel people because it can be very costly for us to subpoena business sort of hits the fire alarm for them all things have to stop and if the alarm is going they have to respond to us so it's a very very powerful tool and so it's I think it can present a lot of problems that would need to be addressed we still have two more questions you've got Jim and then Jessica and we're still on subpoena issue so I'm going to deviate from the subpoena issue if I may the top of page two in subsection C and this is a more of a legal question that's good don't want to miss my chance here it said that this person will reside in the agency of administration and have access to typical support but also legal support of the agency of administration I know the AG's office is a lawyer for the state so I'm trying to wrap my arms around what does this really mean and where does the conflict exist for example I'm going to assume and this may be incorrect but let's just say the Fish and Wildlife Department has been accused of systemic racism the whole department I assume the AG's office might have some responsibility in the department that made me incorrect so just so we can talk if you don't mind talking my language a little bit so the laws that we enforce the Human Rights Commission don't say that you can enforce racism it's racial discrimination so you would have to show discrimination either in employment or in the provision of services or law enforcement by the Fish and Wildlife and that would be under existing law if there were those allegations that would be under the jurisdiction of the Human Rights Commission the department would be represented by an assistant attorney general and responding to the investigation so your office not maybe not you personally but your office would represent the state now if it were an individual within a department that was accused of wrongdoing okay who would defend the individual yeah should be a state employee if the person was accused of discrimination while performing state duties as opposed to something he or she did off duty right there's a state statute that requires the state of Vermont to defend and identify that person so the attorney general's office would do a preliminary investigation to determine whether that person is entitled to representation by the AG's office and then they would represent that individual as well as the agency that would likely happen in the lawsuit like a section 1983 lawsuit where our civil division would typically represent the department and the individual if there were the case that a conflict arose between those two defendants let's say that agency says this is the office is not what we do so we should be responsible and there would be a conflict and there would be private counsel would be provided typically for the individual that a state agency would remain represented by the AG's office so getting back to the agency of administration and access to their legal does that mean staff attorney that they may I don't know what the AG has there's nothing in the bill here that says the attorney general's office would represent the civil rights officer but because he's a cabinet level position it's frankly it's not addressed it says there'll be legal support of the AG that's not staffed by members of the AG the governor has a lawyer I don't know whether it was contemplated that the governor's counsel J. Johnson would be involved in potential litigation I'm not sure if the notion is that if there were a conflict and that they would have the higher law firm then I think that presents that if you leave the the subpoena power in there then that presents kind of a budgetary issue because given the breadth of the subpoena power here it would be reasonable to me that there would be disputes about whether agencies had to turn over materials that are not in the law in terms of the legal lawyer conflict who do they represent they're representing the civil rights officer who's trying to issue the subpoena or do they represent the state agency who may have a different view on the subpoena as I read this bill the attorney general's already existing statutory obligation to represent fish and wildlife let's say would remain intact and my question to the committee or to the legislature is who would represent the civil rights officer it's not clear it's not stated I don't think for under conflict for dealing with legal conflicts it may be very difficult it may be impossible for the AG's office to litigate both sides of the issue they have passed we don't do that now no AG's office does now is there another question? so to go back to the subpoena issue I'm just curious I understand what you're saying about how this is broad and it would be really difficult to carry out but if the chief civil rights officer doesn't report to the governor but he's part of the cabinet in a very loose sort of way he's at that same level I get what you're saying that normally those folks who are at that level they're all secretaries and they are involved in wondering about what's going on inside of a department or so forth it's very easy to talk to each other and say hey because we all work for the same guy and hopefully the same guy is putting forward how important this is but if one of them doesn't it would be incredibly difficult to get information possibly from another secretary if they don't both report to the governor and maybe they're so that's why I think of how they put it in here and so I'm not sure whether or not you would have a suggestion on a resolve for that if you're not, would you think then that the important thing to do would be to have them report to the governor or is there another way to resolve that conflict I think what's the way it's set up now I mean you have identified two issues which kind of they kind of multiply the potential for conflict one is that you have an official who may operate out with one foot outside of the executive's control that's the separation of powers issue and then second that individual would have the authority to subpoena all of the other agencies of state government with nothing in there about confidentiality or a sense of what constitutes relevance so I think that the rest it depends on how that authority is exercised it may not be subpoenas flying out on the first day of work it would depend on the two folks who the governor is, the kind of person what his thoughts are and who the chief civil rights officer is but I think if there were a legal challenge for example that the one of the areas for examination is how justice is, is meted out in connection with the apartment and children and families and let's suppose that the chief civil rights officer says one way we can do our audit is that you give us all of your case files the ones that have the juvenile's names have the names of their parents and their parents are addicted to drugs or alcohol all of that information would be in there and I imagine that there would be an opposition to that with DCF saying these are all protected by a big stack of statutes and it's conceivable that the civil rights officer would say my law says that I can access all relevant records and I think this is relevant I think they would, if they couldn't reach agreement on that then I think that would probably be presented in court I think part of the legal challenge to this opinion would be by an officer who's maybe the subpoena power is not constitutional because of highly separation of powers and then a judge would have to resolve whether the language here about access to all relevant records trumps the language of the other language in a statute that protects the confidentiality of juvenile's and family matters that's just one example it could be pre-sentence reports it could be administration of mental health there are just so many laws that we have that protect information about individuals who come to the state for services or who are in the care of the state either in correctional custody or foster care and so forth and this bill just says all relevant records and the fact that that comes from someone who has kind of one foot in the legislative sphere maybe a toe in the judicial sphere who the chief justice appoints one of the members of the panel who might have who could have a deciding vote on whether to remove the chief civil rights officer I think that's if those are all those are interrelated problems and I think they are problems yeah, thank you any other questions on point number four point number four that I think is very simple which is that there's no provision for confidentiality for all of these records so the public records act has many exemptions and those applied to records that are in agencies control and the question if there's information that's shared in their exemption so we could share investigation from one of our investigations for example with law enforcement so if we and state police were looking at a hate crime or something that comes to us as sexual harassment we think it's sexual assault we could share information with the state police let's imagine for example that the chief civil rights officer gets information through some mechanism if not subpoena some other mechanism the question then becomes whether to what extent that information could be subject to a public records request are the working papers subject to the public records request are the data might come in a way that's not de-identified or aggravated so that's just not addressed at all and we think that it ought to be if and there's no at least stated here there's no confidentiality obligation for the panel or we have a very strict confidentiality rule as of the Human Rights Commission about materials that they receive during the course of an investigation materials received by subpoena or testimony or just information and there's no privacy issue here so I think that's a simple one I guess the next yeah, 0.5 I can't recall if it was 0.5 or 0.6 there is information this is on page 5 of the bill that talks about in section 2 on that page we said that one of the duties of the chief civil rights officers to manage and oversee the statewide collection of race-based data to determine the nature and scope of racial discrimination I will say that we like the word discrimination because we have a lot of case law on what discrimination means we don't have much case law on what racism means if it's any different but the question is what is that statewide information about race data, I mean sometimes someone's race is their belief race, perceived race is pretty easy to discern and sometimes and who's collecting the information are individuals who contact the state government now they have to identify their race each time, sometimes that's done on a voluntary basis but the collection of racial of data dealing with someone's membership in a protected category is a very sensitive issue last year the house voted and passed S79 which prohibited the collection of information relating to religion there were concerns last year or not but there were concerns about the creation of a Muslim registry or the federal government trying to create a registry of Americans and so the collection of data the census case, the citizenship data that's being collected so I think it's an unknown to us what that collection of data is, I think it's unusual to just say this panel and the officer decides what the data is in advance typically you would want to have the legislature and the governor and the creation decide what sorts of data you would want to collect and how that information would be stored and what might be prohibited uses of the data because it might be that one agency knows that there's a lot of racial data out there who might be interested in having it for some purpose and that might be a problem and might be very concerned by that but there would be, there's nothing here to create that so it's kind of a big black box or question mark for us was that a bill or was that a resolution which one the one that was collecting the data it's a law, Act 5 it was passed last year by the House and Senate dealing with the resolution too the one I'm talking about is a statute we refer to it loosely as no registry bill so that's, there were some questions about what racial data is collected and how and how it's managed that's not addressed and that's kind of a that's a big issue I think members of the public you know I think may have an interest in that as well as state employees about how you collect that data what you do with it the final point just has to do with I think operational issues that are presented by the broad language of the bill I think I heard part of the testimony before me saying that there should be more specific targets or priorities set forth in the bill I think both in terms of a policy matter but just an operational manager in terms of government accountability and meeting expectations that's desirable I think there are lots of things here that we don't know for our office if we're to come in it doesn't really we're not sure what certain things mean like it there are provisions here that says that say that I'll give you one example I won't give you all of them I'll just give you one example I think is representative on page 4 it's the last three lines of page 4 this is the first duty of the civil rights officer let's say that the officer shall work with the agencies to implement a program of continuing coordination and improvement of activities in state government I'll just leave it right there I don't know exactly what that means we could imagine because we live in the conflict world we deal with conflict all the time if they're talking let's say they're looking at corrections about issues and the department of corrections says okay we've talked with you we understand your point of view and we disagree is there still a so are you still obligated to work with someone that you just said we agreed upon what we can agree and you're going to be around for the next four years and that topic is we're going to still work on that or to implement a program of continuing coordination I don't really know what that means I think it's general's office is a state agency saying so what is a program of continuing coordination are we supposed to have employees that are set aside to be liaisons to the office to respond to the information quest are they supposed to come up with recommendations and I'm not sure how we would answer that it's just very broad I understand the notion the goal of collaboration and cooperation and working on the same side of the table but in terms of a statute to like set forth duties for a new state employee and office and to put obligations on other agencies it's probably not specific enough and I think that could be a recipe for a conflict that should be avoided so those are the areas that we would talk about again we think it's great to be talking about or to be focused on doing something that has self-examination about discrimination for provision of benefits or administration of justice but the bill at least in this form right now presents these issues that we thought you should be aware of thank you very much are there any further questions Mr. Thompson from ACM thank you Diana please my name is Diana Wally and I'm the convener of the community equity collaborative of southeastern Vermont maybe I could begin by describing our collaborative I included oh let me hear I do have copies for you and was it southeastern or southeastern Kristen's area I included with my testimony a longer detailed description of our collaborative because I just think it's we're coming to you as a community rather than with a special skill and we were founded after the quite serious race hate incidents that took place in our high school in Brattleboro and in our transportation transportation center in 2008 these might ring a bell they were serious enough that the community convened and it was like a tipping point people had numerous community meetings and discussions and really saw this as a time to look at for meaningful and long term ways to respond to those kinds of incidents something that we did as a group and Curtis was one of our founding members and helped to lead the organization of a future search conference which engaged 80 people in our community that represented a cross section of the community youth and adults all sectors economically and community leadership and we spent three days together considering what had happened similar events that had happened in our community in the past and by the end of the three days had arrived at four distinct actions that we felt would really make a difference to the future and that's when our collaborative formed we are the stewards of those four actions what they are are first of all anti-bias law enforcement education social competency development in our public schools and that is my work this is our collaborative as a voluntary entity but in my work life I have worked with the Wyndham Supervisory Union for the past 10 years to develop this social competency development curriculum which is a parallel to the academic curriculum and its intent is to create positive relationships and inclusive schools welcoming schools this third action is a celebrate diversity day that happens in our community every single year that is community wide and positive and is fun and engaging and the last is Vermont Vision for a Multicultural Statewide Conference which Curtis and the Vermont Partnership administratively run but our collaborative sees it as our responsibility to galvanize participation and now that's going into its seventh year 20% of the students in our public schools identify as students of color and we think that's an inspiration to us to be proactive if you look at our census maybe we're talking 5% of our Southeastern Vermont population are citizens of color community members of color but we can see that we're evolving and we want to create a community that is free of prejudice and discrimination and our membership is a cross-section of community leadership it's very inspiring to be at our meetings so this is Doris S 281 we have testified three times during the senate meetings and this is just a summary of ways that we feel this bill could be improved or expanded so the first is we don't think it's necessarily an assumption that everybody reading this bill knows what these terms are about and when we're talking about institutional racism that they understand or perhaps there's a variety of ways that they would come at that term and we thought it might be a good idea to include a definition I know there are some bills that start off with a definition so we put forth what we think is an example you might arrive at a better clearer definition but the one that includes institutional attitudes beliefs and behaviors that inform policies and practices that privilege the dominant racial and linguistic group which includes white people and people for whom English is their first language so this is an example but perhaps you will find something that could be clearer but we just recommend that people are on the same page when they're then proceeding with working with the bill on the advisory panel we did and I learned a lot from Mr. Thompson's testimony here we did agree with the majority of appointments being people of color but that might be questionable when looking at the position itself I know from sitting in the senate discussions that there was a concern that the appointment by the governor if that's the way that it was established that the position might become politicized and therefore every succeeding administration might say no we want this guy in there or we want this woman in there and there would be a lot of shifting back and forth that would water down the meaning and the power of the position so just from witnessing the going back and forth what their point was about keeping it independent just as Curtis recommended we also questioned the title civil rights for the same reasons that seemed more individually oriented mitigation is one idea we also thought maybe equity would be another title perhaps you'll have through other testimony better recommendations so one thing and this is from our experience that we have had that we wanted to share and we felt that it might be informative to you in the way that you think about the support for this position so in other work settings I think that there certainly have been chief diversity officers that have been appointed in a variety of settings whether they be private work settings or in public services in the school for international training in the graduate school in Brattleboro over a number of years there has been a lot of conflict between the administration and the students about the need for diversity education and improving the way the school was run last year they took the bull by the horn and they hired a chief diversity officer Michelle Cromwell highly skilled and came with an abundance of experience in thinking about education settings and the needs and within four months she resigned the reason was that the school itself and its administration had not really thought ahead about what type of support she needed to move forward they hadn't really given thought to having an individual coming in and giving them these recommendations what they were facing in terms of changing their own ways of doing their work so I hand this just as an example and like our question that we pose is how do we ensure that this officer has the necessary power within various spheres of influence in state government how to make sure that we have the officers back and in advance for instance where their office is situated what type of an environment are they in and is it a welcoming is there a team spirit to the work setting so enough on that this work dovetails with the states mandate for results based accountability and I think that's part of its power very encouraging to see the possibility for close collaboration with the chief performance officers and each state agency and department so the task is to develop performance targets and performance measures I in the last two pages of my testimony I provided some examples having worked as a trainer with results based accountability around the state it was inspiring to me to think about ways that this effort can be accountable so what you will see on the back two pages are first of all racial equity and Act 186 the conditions for well-being for all Vermonters measuring population well-being so seeing how this work dovetails with the outcomes that are embedded in our work statewide and I just I'm including when you're thinking of what are we going to measure I included some examples that just pop out for me you have a full list of some examples I've listed but for example Vermont has a prosperous economy the percent of business owners who are people of color the percent of homeowners that are people of color that relates to Mark's testimony this 17% versus 77% was very enlightening to me and then going into my realm of work within the public schools children succeed in school the percent of children of color who drop out of school and I really learned a lot when I was a red flag went up when Mr. Compton was doing his critique just now because I myself within our own school district have had a hard time creating year to year data comparisons since we don't have a high population of students of color of the dropout rate and some administrators feel that they really need to protect that information so just one small example from my corner of the world then thinking okay service systems we see these population indicators that we're interested in tracking how do they relate when we're measuring performance and the well-being of clients and it's heartening to me that in Sue Zeller's work as chief performance officer that she has appointed a liaison in each agency each department that is working on performance I can see that that team of liaisons being a really supportive work team with this new officer and so again I'll use an example drawn from the indicator that I referred to about the percent of business owners who are people of color if we look in the service system for economic development one performance measure could be is there entrepreneur development education that engages effectively people of color so one example another one regarding education again if we're thinking about why do students drop out do they feel welcome in their school a performance measure could be social competency development education is established as parallel to academic achievement in all public schools and then thinking about graduation or summer or after school experiences our new programs exist to help youth of color gain connections to the larger community where they see themselves as having a valuable role so these are all very measurable work I appreciate having a connection with through Russell the AHS performance officer and looking this over and just critiquing it before I prepared it for my testimony so the next piece of what I wanted to share is regarding this review what is called an assessment a review that is a first task that the officer will do and perhaps be hiring a team of consultants to complete the review our collaborative really thought about that and not just as something that happens you get a report and then you start doing your work but let me just read how we define it we see this inventory as a power analysis of state government focusing on institutional racism the depth of the inquiry relates to the quality of the outcome key areas of inquiry will include the whole spectrum recruitment, hiring, retention workplace culture and client advocacy the needs assessment is a building block in a long term strategy it is the beginning of racial disparities education where the focus is on relationship building so again I want to reinforce what Curtis's testimony was so strong with about this is an asset building opportunity we need to be aware that by unveiling what has not worked this inventory is excavating people's worst fears we're asking participants to name how privilege is operating in their work setting a carefully crafted design will result in honest feedback the hope is to use methods promoting effective conversations perhaps through focus groups that the civil rights officer can use as a guide a multitude of disparities will be identified in this process so of course the hope is to reinforce the best practice as Curtis testified but there will be a multitude of disparities that will be unveiled and the hope is that that can be done in a productive relationship manner my final piece has to do with the training curriculum and our collaborative has been working for the past eight months or so ever since the last Vermont vision for a multicultural future conference where representatives Morris, Gonzales and Senator Ballant joined in with me and with other members of the collaborative to think about their hope for having legislative legislative education on these topics of racial disparities implicit bias how to make something like that happen annually we have been meeting recently with the Snelling Center on that effort so in that process we thought what are we talking about here and we felt quite clear that this was not a check off one workshop kind of a deal instead what we're sharing with you here are three different areas of curriculum content that we feel over time could be covered with the training plan that the officer develops after the review is completed and so the first of those would be understanding it would be a personal level understanding our own social identity the second would be understanding institutional and structural racism in Vermont and nationally and the third is understanding those intersections and in our conversations with Senator Ash and with Representative Johnson they both brought up that intersectionality that's important related to other populations issues such as socioeconomic etc so this is the key areas that we feel you should consider and we really feel it was an honor to be part of your work on this field. Thank you. Thank you very much for a very thorough look at the issue. I have questions. John. So Diana, based on your testimony I think that you don't think that the Chief Civil Rights Officer should be set up in this sort of stovepipe of independence. We have a concern about that although we understood the Senate's wish that this not be a political pointy position that could waiver. We know that this is a long effort. I think we put in the beginning of our testimony we can imagine this being a 10 year effort knowing the work in our region has taken that long and so to waiver back and forth with appointments is a danger but the answer is yes we're worried that there would be an isolated isolation. Right and to be effective in collaborating with various state agencies in getting some of this important work done. Yeah. I did like your idea of coordination between this position and the Chief Performance Officer in the state. Right. That's intriguing. It's not really spilled out currently in the bill. Yes. It's not a way to implement this in a proactive sort of way rather than reacting to what may or may not be going on in state government with respect to systemic racism. As long as the resources are there for Surzellar to feel oh my gosh I'm just being landed with something that's massive to deal with in addition to what I'm already doing. As long as the resources are there I think that's a good idea. Thank you. Other questions? Thank you very much. That long last? No, it's been great. I think your schedule allows you to spend the morning with us. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. For the record I'm Beth Fastigian, Commissioner of Human Resources and I'm going to turn my notes over. Over the course of this legislative session I have a background in the private sector. I've spent 30 years in the private sector. One of the companies I work most recently as the state president of Fairpoint Communications and I've been in this position almost a year. I feel like I've gotten my feet wet in state government and it's been really very interesting concept. Just a part of that, one of the companies I work for was Verizon. Verizon had a very extensive background company initiative around diversity. We had supplier diversity programs, employee diversity programs, customer diversity programs. Our philanthropic efforts focused on diversity organizations in many cases are also marketing efforts. It was kind of a long tradition of working for that company in a culture that really embraced diversity. It was really considered a business imperative and it really came from the top down and it was really woven into all the values that we did as a company. I just wanted to give you that a little bit of a background and thank you guys for having given me the opportunity to testify with respect to this bill and the administration that you want to spill. From what I understand the evolution of this bill has in part come out of what was passed last year in Act 54 and some of the report outs and the findings or I'll call them findings but the report on systemic racism in Vermont. And as the report documents they're really implicit racial bias does exist in the state and it also persists in all areas of Vermont that were investigated by the Attorney General's Office and the Human Rights Commission so if you haven't read that report I would encourage you to do so. There's also an executive summary that's shorter and I know you're going to be getting a lot of other information to read today. And I think the persistence of this implicit bias manifests a systemic racism and it prevents true equality of opportunity for all of these realms in housing, in public education and employment throughout our society and culture. We're the largest employer in the state of Vermont because there's some UVM healthcare maybe expanding and be a little higher than us right now but as one of the state's larger employer we would not be immune to the effects of systemic racism and it really constitutes government and insofar as that S-281 acknowledges the existence of this problem that really does represent a laudable step by the legislature in moving towards eradicating it so I think building on what Mr. Hughes was saying earlier that that's what he was saying was laudable, the fact that the Senate recognized that and wanted to do something about it. The Department of Human Resources as well as the administration thoroughly support and share the goal of this legislation to eradicate systemic racism across and throughout state government both in employment, workplace practices and in the provision of many of the services that we provide from the issuance of providing driver's licenses and vehicle registrations at the DMV to reviewing, processing tax returns and again to protecting the state's most vulnerable and at-risk citizens through the Department of Children and Families. S-281 creates a new high-level position in state government, the chief civil rights officer, perhaps the chief mitigation officer which I also liked that title. Also creates an advisory panel charged with the duty to hire and endow with exclusive power to move the chief civil rights officer and the Department believes that the goal of this bill to work toward and attain the eradication of systemic racism could be achieved without this particular construct to really work toward this what's required is leadership from the highest office and the highest levels in state government. So you really do need the governor, the secretaries the department commissioners plus the division heads and directors really to buy in to a cultural change and work toward it and work toward that with enthusiasm and if there's not enthusiasm for that that enthusiasm needs to be driven from the top down and I don't think that is going to be easy to do but I also think that the construct that's set up with an advisory panel that's hiring a person that will be embedded in an organization that has not been chosen by the chief executive of the organization is setting that person up in the office up for failure as Ms. Walling was saying and it's also not the best construct for effective change and making that happen and feeling like everybody's working towards the same mission if you have to go to if you have to get a subpoena to compel somebody to provide the right information or to work towards getting information that's going to help us toward this mission it's totally gone in the wrong direction and we have we already have the human rights commission that's that investigates and provides opinions on explicit racism and in our in our as an employer they already do that and are doing that work and no offense to Karen but I really wouldn't want I really wouldn't want her just saying hey you have to show me this you have to show me this all the time and just coming into work in our office even though we support the work of each other and we're on the same committee which is the same council which is the governor of our first acting and diversity council we work pretty closely on that on shared goals and how we can work to improve things there are times when we're in adversarial positions and then also might work together on a compromise to do training and help train employees and we have some great successes in that but I don't think in this position I want the human rights commission sitting in the same office as the secretary of administration I think that would be counterproductive and that's almost the type of situation has been set up but haven't put this chief civil rights officer in with that panel so if you had a whole construct that could support it like they do at the human rights commission that might work having one person doing that work kind of embedded but not really supported fully supported is unworkable from my perspective if it's the intent of legislation to set up an advisory panel that advisory panel would be able to do that provide advice to the governor to agency secretaries also to other branches of government and we welcome advice from from people but a formal panel to provide advice seems like that is very workable some kind of construct around that would be fine but a new but a new person with his task and if that is the direction the bill goes in would be best to have that person reporting directly for the governor also the panel could potentially advise you know present candidates to the governor for selection and it would be very helpful to have a panel as named in this organization help provide candidates for this position but as supposed to the ability to remove that person and the ability to hire that person in the organizational dynamic and if you want to create cultural change really should be accountable to the governor and the administration ready for some questions? I just wanted to talk about some of the tools and resources and good efforts that are already happening in state government so what I'm going to do is list them I think you're going to be hearing from a lot of folks that have been talking about that but to step back we do have a state EEO plan that we do every year that comes out of the human resources department and I can share that too there are some statistics in there that talk about percentage of minority and women hires how we're doing on recruiting how we're doing on retention of those employees the progress over time so that is all on the report it does demonstrate we're making some progress maybe not as quickly as we would like but in those areas there has been improvements shown over the past several years we also have our workforce report which I not sure if I've talked about in this committee or not but it has a lot of great statistics about our employees and our workforce in here so if you don't have it it's available online you might not want to need to print the whole thing out in the minds of saving paper but it's a very good report it has a lot of statistics in it with a good starting point for data collection of this position also Ms. Wally mentioned the chief performance officer I want to point out that person is also accountable to the governor and is embedded within the administration has survived several administrations and is a highly valued and respected member of leadership in state government and I envision this position could also have just that same level of authority and respect and ability to effect change as the chief performance officer has so I really appreciate your comments in that area we have really good examples from various agencies you're going to be hearing from the state police and their parent partial policing also from the civil rights from the agency of transportation those are some really good bright spots and examples that we take and we look to see how we can do that in other agencies so those are some of the ongoing efforts that we're doing and learning from different agencies and seeing where we can use what they've done across state government we have the center for achievement in public service which is our statewide training center through that we have online and classroom training we offer training both diversity and cultural competence we are also developing training implicit bias as we speak we diversity and cultural competency training is mandatory for all supervisors and state governments and we're also even though it's not relative to systemic racism I just want to highlight the efforts that we're doing with our course on preventing addressing sexual harassment in the workforce where we're training all employees and state government on this issue we've already trained the cabinet and the extended cabinet and by the end of the year we'll have all of our employees trained to massive effort and it's really from what I know one of the first times that we're doing a training that is going to be done across all state government all state agencies usually a lot of training especially a lot of training is really up to the individual agency and it's really time to make sure that all employees at all levels really understand what the policies are what their rights are how they can how they can make a complaint how they feel protected also with supervisors and leaders understand that they're responsible and not only does that go towards sexual harassment but it's also the same type of procedures you would go to if you were going to try to report a discrimination complaint so any type of complaint so employees even though it's a different training they are being educated on how to where to go if you experience a problem and what your resources are and how that the state will investigate and will work to protect those employees and our state strategic plan we have a strategic plan the agency administration has goals on those plans along the lines of employee recruitment and retention and changing the cultural chores that it's our job to implement that part of our plan including as far as our recruitment efforts we're actually just signed the contract with our vendor to get some new recruitment software that's going to be provided with much better statistics on minority applicants and when they might be dropping out of the recruitment process so it has a much better ability than we currently have to look at that data once we get that in place it also has the ability to look at job descriptions and to look at bias in job descriptions and call those out so we can change job descriptions before we get up also so that I just wanted to point out some of the few of the efforts that are going along also I briefly mentioned it but the governor's workforce equity and diversity council is made up of appointees from different agencies including the human race commission, the women's commission members of the public so it's a 15 member up to I think it's up to 15 members that can be on that council and the purpose of that council is to provide advice and advice and I guess it's just pretty much advice for whatever we want for the commissioner of human resources and the secretary of the agency administration on equal employment issues and there's been a lot of good work in the past and I'm excited for the work that they're continuing to do and that's I think that is it so we have questions for you thank you, we have questions from Dennis and Jim so you were in the room when the assistant attorney general was talking about the six issues and he mentioned about it would put an obligation to work with the panel on to the state we also talked about no provision for confidentiality which I would think you have concerns with that and also the collection of data and managing data and stuff so I mean that puts you in a position where you know I understand you're moving together and I'm sure you would anyway but those are three areas that I would think yeah I fully support the attorney general's all six of their points and calling those out as all issues and he definitely spoke much more eloquently than I can about them from a legal perspective from a legal perspective I think the setup is problematic but also I'm from an organizational perspective and the ability to affect cultural change is problematic as well I think it's really it is a major task to work to eradicate systemic racism and it needs full buy-in from leadership like the changes that we've seen in the Department of Public Safety over the past several years it has had full buy-in of leadership over the time and that's transcended beyond commissioners and you have to remember that the people who are actually doing the work are classified state employees that are you know once they are behind the mission it's very difficult to change it so there's very high level leaders in state government that are not appointed working towards this mission and embracing it and change will will continue and you know over time organic thank you Beth I'm a little confused by some of your earlier remarks on some of the issues and then some of the details on the bill but the legislative intent is creating a culture of inclusiveness so I think that he supposes we don't have a culture of inclusiveness in state government would you agree with that statement? I agree that we want to create a culture of inclusiveness in state government I would say that culturally inclusiveness is something that we're actually working at in our on-boarding initiative we have a part of our strategic goals we're actually looking at employees when they start for the first six months and how they're welcomed into state government the workforce the available workforce is dwindling as our population is decreasing and as we age and it can be a challenge to attract employees we want to keep we don't want to lose them to the private sector and if they're not coming into an environment that's challenging and welcoming they will leave and so I think it's really from the individual perspective I think the people who are staying in their jobs may think it's welcoming but the people who are leaving may not think it's particularly welcoming and when you also look at statistics about minorities leave state government at a faster rate than white employees at a much a much faster rate that's something that we need to continue to work on to improve and if you can make new employees for six months the first six months of their experience a satisfying experience they're much more at to stay so it's also very agency dependent you can talk to individual employees and people say this is a great welcoming culture or you can talk to other employees that say this is a horrible culture so it's really it's really how the individual perceives it and we need to make sure as my job is to make sure that employees that come we give them the best chance to succeed as employees so that's what I meant by that okay so getting to the structure we have this board and then we have a chief officer we can talk about the title but we have a chief officer so you raised some of the obvious points with conflict but I'm still confused are you saying that maybe this would be okay if it was appointed by the governor as a chief executive or indirectly with the panel that the governor appoints but then later on if you say well maybe just having a panel and an advisory capacity so I'm confused and I may not have been listening carefully enough to your words where is the administration do you support the appointment of a panel however that's appointed with the chief executive or just an advisory panel without the chief executive and is that a budgetary issue or that's all I'm just trying to get clarity so through an executive order the governor could do much of this work except for wouldn't have any authority over the judiciary or the legislature but through an executive authority the governor could create his own advisory panel to advise him and to advise the secretary on issues of systemic racism and the governor also already does take advice from people regarding these issues I mean it's not so well we cannot get that right so I would say a panel is not absolutely necessary to affect change if there is to be a panel in an advisory capacity that if the chief civil rights officer is going to be hired that panel could review the applicants, seek applicants make recommendations but ultimately the leader of the executive branch where that position is if that position is to sit within the executive branch in the administration should be accountable to the administrative leadership so it should be accountable to the governor and secretary of the secretary so let me ask a question a different way what if that person resides in another one of these state buildings and the pavilion and it's totally independent and not supported staff wise the agency of administration so it doesn't sit within the administration would you support that model that model similar to a human rights commission or an ethics commission right would be a more difficult model to affect change if the goal is to affect cultural change within the administration it would be somebody outside the administration either getting cooperation as the statute would require or demanding cooperation but the amount of cooperation that they actually get would would not have the same impact as it would if the leadership was fully supportive of this position and I think when you're having a separate entity that has a separate mission you're not going to have full leadership buy in to affect the change so you don't support a totally independent model a totally independent model if there was a totally independent model I think their charge would be different than what is in this bill right now if it's if it's an ombudsman that's going to be talking about issues and helping people and businesses and agencies across the state working it depends on what you want that person to be if you want the person to be affecting change in state government it's going to be hard to do that from outside questions for that I'm going to assess your own learning too and yet we are past our allotted time I hope it was informative helpful to hear what everybody else had to say is it possible to to be first on the list tomorrow morning it is for me I'm sure absolutely ma'am Sharon I wanted to mention that I was in contact with Kate Logan she apologized but would like to be on the schedule tomorrow if possible okay and how about yourself I'm not testifying oh you're not no offense just one less person to try should work