 Hi, my name is Richard Scheer and this is the Montpelier City Forum where we talk about Town Meeting Day and we've talked about races for city council contested in all three districts. We have the mayor's candidate Anne Watson, we have city budget, we have school budget, we have the bonding issues and today we have the city clerk's office where we have our sole candidate, John Odom, our incumbent. Well, thanks for having me. John, how long have you been city clerk? Six years. So this will be, what is that, my third term assuming there isn't a big write-in campaign that... Well, assuming there is anyway, you're a lot better known than whoever would write in. Let's take us back six years ago. It was a contested race, Charlotte Hoyt, the former city clerk had just retired. And what caused you to want to be city clerk? How much did you know about the office at that time? Well, I had a pretty good sense of what the office did just from, you know, I was a justice of the peace for a while so that, you know, they work obviously very closely with the clerk's office. You know, I had sort of had a bit of an eye on it for a long time and quite frankly I'd been doing consulting for the year before and the beginning part of that year I had more work than I could do. By the time the election came around I was having a hard time putting it together and I actually had a couple people come to me and say, you should do this. And I thought, yeah, all right, well, that would work. It's a tricky thing to run for, right? Well, so... Well... You're not running against a long-time incumbent, it's an empty office. But I mean, it's a tricky thing to actually be prepared to win because it is a full time job and there's a lot of moving pieces. Is it a full time job or is it more than a full time job? Well, it's interesting. During the election years it's a more than full time job. On these off years where we just have town meeting I actually have a little bit more time and that's where I've...and those are the years that I've worked on upgrading the system or some extra things for the city like the museum but in terms of the trickiness of running the problem is whoever wins you have to be able to be prepared to start full-time the next day and not a lot of people in a position to do that. I mean, what do you tell your employer? So, you know, I was down to 10 hours a week in consulting, mainly working for the bridge. So, you know, I was in a position...it was just a perfect timing for me to be in a position to run. Now, it's not quite the next day. I mean, figuratively speaking, it's not the next day but it's close. No, it's literally the next day. Oh, is it literally the next day? Yep, the day after election day. Oh, my goodness. I was clerk, Charlotte wasn't, and I walked to work. But you already knew the people in there. Well, I was acquainted with... Crystal and her group. Yeah, I was acquainted with Crystal. I didn't really know the other folks, though. And I mean, I was acquainted with Charlotte, too. But I'd already had a sense of Crystal and one of the...you know, when I... and Crystal is the deputy clerk at the time, the assistant clerk. I mean, the first thing I did when I decided I was going to run was go in and, you know, speak to her, speak to Charlotte, and, you know, get the lay of the land record. Look at your land record just to see how the land record's looking. Right, but also just to feel out, you know, how did they feel about me running? They hadn't had a lot of contact with me and to the extent they had. It was, you know, really around election things, collecting lists. And, you know, I didn't know what sense they had of me. And I...if, you know, if they thought, oh, that guy, you know, I didn't want to inflict myself upon them. But it was, you know, it was good. It was very positive and starting out was great. I mean, the folks are...they know what they're doing. What's your role with City Council? With City Council, I'm the secretary. So, you know, I'm there at meetings. I'm taking minutes. I'm not formally the parliamentarian. The tradition is for them to appoint one of their bodies as the parliamentarian. But I become the sort of de facto parliamentarian. And I also consider myself a resource for them when meetings aren't going on. For information, for, you know, sometimes for, you know, helping out with their concerns. So, and that can...you know, there's often somebody who's in touch with me about one thing or another, but usually it's just informational stuff. But you have to sit through those marathon sessions. I do. When there's a lot of discussion, you'll see me with two computers and I'm working on other stuff during the day I need to get caught up on. And it's kind of like if they don't hear from you, things are going well. Yeah, yeah. And when they do, it becomes the dog ordinance. What happened with the dog ordinance? You know, I'm not entirely sure. But the vote on the dog ordinance. Well, the vote, it had been delayed for some time, the second reading. The first reading had been pretty far back, months back. So it became this process of continuing the second reading, just, you know, in terms of keeping it correct under parliamentary procedure. And during that time, I mean, often between first and second reading, you'll see tweaks done and some, you know, the council will approve little adaptations and corrections. And there was, although, you know, the base ordinance stayed the same. There were definitely quite a few tweaks. There had been a citizen group working on it to come up with a base idea. And then between that first reading and that delayed second reading, there was, you know, there was a little bit more done. And there was even a push from some folks to extend the second reading again this last time, but the council was ready to vote. And they took out the parks in the final, that the parks would be separate? Yeah, yeah, they distinguished the parks, you know, because in the sense that the parks have their own rules and, yeah. Now, before that, actually, I was referencing the dog vote. Oh, oh, the special meeting. Exactly, that was one where there was a problem. There was a problem. And I am very, very conservative. Well, I'm conservative in everything I do. I'm conservative with the land records. I am neurotically dot my I's and cross my T's. And that conservative nature, it got me in a little trouble. First, I made a very conservative choice and leaned on the council a little bit to follow that really worked in the favor of the folks who were opposed to the vote. Which was to kind of deal with dogs in the park, right? Yes. And then the second decision I made when, unfortunately, the Times Argus screwed up the printing of the warning, which put us in a bad situation. Because I had a backup warning ready to go. We were going to fire it off because they were going to amend or even eliminate that item. And then the warning got printed prematurely. And I got a sort of a mixed reaction from talking to the city's attorneys. And it just wasn't firm. So then I had to advocate, you know, the conservative thing to do is just to go forward with this, which then made some of the folks who were very happy with me a couple of weeks before very angry with me. I mean, that's a good illustration, I think, of some of the positions you might get put in in this role when you're really a guardian of the process. Now, you're a guardian of the election process. And perhaps that's one of the most important roles of the city clerk. Oh, it's my favorite. Besides collecting our water bills and our tax bills. Talk about that one for a second. How is that different six years ago than it is now? Other than the fact that you can get your petitions online. Well, yeah, you can get a lot of that information online. A lot of things have changed sort of top down in policy since then. Probably the biggest thing is the same day voter registration. When was that put in? That's a state law, isn't it? That state law that was put into place a couple, maybe a couple years ago, that put me in an interesting situation because that's something I feel very strongly in favor of. And why? Well, part of it is there would there will be people who will say that it puts the system's integrity and jeopardy. Well, I look at this as a balance, right? You've got to maintain a balance when you're talking public policy between looking out for that voter fraud and essentially keeping the government out of the way of folks performing their most fundamental right in any democratic society, and that's to vote. That brings out the libertarian streak in me. I don't think government should be involved in that unless there's a problem. And there has not been a demonstrated problem with fraud at this point. So the scale, the balance was like this. Now, if you see that balance start to go this way and fraud starts to become a problem, you're going to see me justice vehemently go the other direction. But it's just not there yet. The balance isn't there. So I was very much in favor of this. Now, have we seen any cases in the last six years of people trying to vote for other people? You mean as far as like voting twice or something like that? Yeah, voting twice or saying that I'm, well, I suppose your neighbors are the ones who are checking you in. But has there been anyone who said, I'm Gabriel, I'm my son? Anecdotally during the process of hearings before the Senate House government operations, you had a lot of clerks, and most clerks were opposed to this. You had a small two or three or four sort of anecdotal ones. There was only one, I think, where there was actually a call to the Attorney General's office, and it was a definite issue. How do we deal with F&T ballots to assure the integrity of that system? Well, that's largely helped by the other big change we have, which is so much of this process going online. In the last six years, we've got a new common voter registration system, a common, you know, we're all feeding into a statewide database. So the Secretary of State's office completely overhauled that system. They took it from one that was stone age into something very modern. And because of that, we're all able to track absentee ballots in a common system. So once someone gets tagged at that, they're not going to be able to go and vote somebody else. And with the same-day registration, too, we can immediately tag them as having participated. So then if they try to go to another place and participate, that clerk's going to bring that up, going to look at them and say, oh, you've already voted. What's last day I can vote absentee and still have it count for town meeting day? Well, in Vermont, and this is different than other states, we expect that all ballots that are going to be counted have to be in by that common deadline, by 7 o'clock when polls close on election day. So you're sort of at the, you know, whereas other states, they're going to look at the post mark, they're going to keep that final tally open. In Vermont, we just look at that as a hard deadline. So you're somewhat at the mercy of the post office. So we advise people, you know, if they're going to get an absentee ballot and mail it in, and you've got three or four business days, mailing days left. If you're going to have a friend deliver it by hand to the clerk's office, when does it need to be delivered by 7 p.m. on election day? Oh, okay. When the polls close. Sealed and everything is signed. Everything that's in at that point gets counted. After that, it is not. How reliable are those machines that you feed the piece of paper in to get the little sticker? They're actually really, really reliable. This is, you know, this is different than like the touch screens and things that you hear about that have sometimes gone a little wrong. This is really reliable technology. It's this, you know, scanner technology that's been around for 25 years. It's tried and true and tested. And those machines, they're that really solid technology. I could just about throw one across the room and it would still work. But we do test them. I mean, there's a rotating. Well, we test them all before we, before we test them. Just throw a certain number of, yeah. We make a lot of fake ballots every imaginable way possible and put them through. And then there's also an auditing procedure that the Secretary of State does. Not to every polling place, but it's rotating. I think it's like, you know, 6, 10 a year, they'll audit. And I think, actually, a modular system is coming up for an audit here in the next couple. So, you know, they're keeping their eyes open. We saw in Virginia, in the special election of Virginia, that intent came into question as to what is this paper about? What was the intent? You had intent come into question once in the Ashley Hill Francis Brooks State Senate race. What was that like? Can you walk us through what it's like to try and figure out intent? Who is sitting in that room with you trying to figure out intent? Well, that was interesting. During the recount, which was really overseen by the Secretary of State's office, it was easier because it was within one party. Actually, it was very simple. So then it was just a matter of turning people out who identify within that party to do the recount. If it had been multiple party, then you've got to make sure you get folks of both. And the intent is actually generally fairly simple. I mean, even if people screw up their ballots and intent rules, we really do want to make it as a system. Now, can you walk me through an intent? Well, what it looked like, can you paint a word picture of what one of those ballots that was under question in that race looked like? Well, there were a lot when we went from beginning to end, where we would have to look where somebody fills in like one oval, and then they cross it out, and they put an arrow to the other one. Something like that is pretty easy to tell. Or somebody has a hard time with their hand and holding it still, and there's a sort of scribble outside one. It's easy to tell. The last, I think it came down to three ballots in that primary that you're referring to. And looking at the ballots, I think I and most of the folks there felt like they made the right call. There was a ballot that I think the oval wasn't quite fully filled in, so the argument could be made that it was intended to be left blank if I recall it correctly. But I think objectively, I think it came down to a judge because there was some finality, a handful, I think three ballots that needed to be reviewed that the volunteers couldn't come to a consensus on. So the judge made the decision. Who were the volunteer counters? Well, that's folks who came from the sort of democratic infrastructure. Because it was just the party. Because it was just the party, which made it a whole lot. Yeah, that made it a lot easier. But it was still no fun. Now, you're cut into the national issues of voter fraud, I suppose, voter integrity, no matter which way you look at it. What are you talking about on the national level? Is that a spirited discussion? And do you feel that the national system is secure for 2018? Well, I mean, of course, what we're talking about is tampering, electronic tampering, hacking, that kind of thing. And that's a complicated question. I mean, our system is very decentralized, although that became a lot less true with the passage of the Help America Vote Act after the. What year was that? That would have passed in 2002. It was the sort of collective response to the Florida debacle in the 2000 presidential election. That created some common standards, which went a long way to making the state's processes a little more uniform. It's still decentralized. So that's a plus for hacking. It means if you can't get in and mess them all up, but it's state by state. And for the most part, voting machines are not networked and not connected to the internet, for the most part, which means the actual vote tallies at the polling place are going to be, the integrity is going to be complete. So the big problem that cheer folks talking about is that the voter registration roles often are accessible from the internet. I mean, I think probably as a rule, they're accessible through the internet. So that's where you could get the easiest target for tampering. How clean are Mount Piliers' roles in terms of having only people who you believe are going to actually live where they live and actually vote? We just made a massive cleanup last year. It was very satisfying. We get a lot of people coming in and out a lot more than you'd think that move in and out. And since the process is slow to take people off, our voting list tends to bloat very quickly. I mean, you had people registering to vote in Mount Piliers, I think they'd never registered to vote before during when Bernie was on the ballot. And then they moved out to some place else. But we have challenged a lot of voters. So in terms of active, unchallenged voters, it's at about 5,700 right now, which feels good. Out of how many adults? What percentage of our adult population do you believe is actually registered to vote? Oh, I think most of them, by far. Because the other major change that's happened is that we now have, when you go to get your driver's license renewed or get a new driver's license, instead of opt-in devoting, it's opt-out. So you're automatically registered, unless you specifically say, don't register me. And nobody does that. So that's been great for making sure that a much higher percentage of folks who should be registered are registered. And it's also been an extraordinary tool for us to clean up our data. Because a lot of our data is, it tends to be out of date. People move and they don't, I mean, even across town. They don't necessarily let us know. If you move across town from District 2 to District 3, and you vote in District 2, is your vote going to be valid? Will the vote be captured? Technically, we make people, we ask that people come and adjust their registration to reflect their correct district. Can you do that? If I show up on election day and I realize, oh my god, I think I'm on the roll still for District 2 and I live in District 3, can you make that change on the fly? You can make that change on the fly, although legally, and I'm not a big fan of this, you can vote in the district that you're still registered in. I don't love that. But so that's why we try to encourage folks to get in the right districts. Do you have any problems with the gerrymanders that create three districts in this town that are so unusual that District 2 goes all the way from town, from the edge of Town Hill Road down to Barrie? Oh, I. And at District 3 includes some very unusual slenders and slices. I don't think that's a fair characterization at all. I remember when they did that redistricting process. The trick was you have to have the same amount or roughly the same amount of people in each one. And if you look at it, I mean, you make it sound like it's North Carolina or something. It's a pretty even three, except there's this sort of thumb of District 3 that sort of pokes up there downtown. And I'm actually in that thumb. So that's the weird part. I think the rest is pretty straightforward, but that little. And that was just in there to balance out the population. Now, most people know you for elections. Talk about our property taxes and what do you collect? Well, technically, it's not my responsibility to collect that anymore. It's in the finance department. It's just that it comes into my office. OK, what comes into your office for collections? I run on the file side of a parking ticket. Where do I take it? You take it into my office. It's interesting, since the finance, well, since the clerk and the treasurer split up into two different offices, the clerk's office is actually sort of a combination of staffers from both. But most of us, including myself, will work on both ends of things, just to make sure the service works and people aren't waiting in line. So what are you collecting? So we collect parking tickets. We collect the utility bills, the water and sewer. We collect property taxes. Then more specifically, to the clerks, we collect business licenses, marriage license, dog license. We collect money for recording of land documents. Boy, I'm sure there's more, and I'm just not thinking of it. Marriage licenses? Yep, yep. Now, you've got to measure on the ballot in one of the articles. Yeah, I guess it's sort of like mine. I mean, I'm the one who put it out there and pushed for it. Would you explain that? Because most people have no idea what that's about. Yeah, and I'm going to get all that stuff on the website here and send out something. So to try to clarify, because there's four charter changes on the ballot, and we seem to be changing the charter every year or two now. The one that I pushed for, a complaint I hear a lot is folks, very, I don't mean small business people. I mean, really small business people will come in and they'll get charged for that business personal property tax for their business stuff. And a lot of them, a perfect example, I think I was someone who was a masseuse and came in and she has to come in and pay this tax based on her massage table and a few things. And it's so small that it amounts to a nuisance tax. It's like the city isn't really getting anything from it. She has to remember to do it. And she comes in and pays her $12. And you say all it is is sort of this pesky little thing. So I worked with the assessor's office and the assessor's office felt the same way. And the charter change, because this stuff has to be changed through the charter, because it's so defined. Well, it's so defined by statute. And the charter, of course, is its own statute. But this would, so any business that has up to $10,000 of taxable business property, business equipment, would be exempt from having to pay any. So that, you know that. How many remain left, roughly? It's actually. Other than national life. Actually, at that level, this is really thumbnail. But if you've got about $4,000 to $5,000, technically, about 2 thirds of them are cut right off. So it's just leaving that 1 third left. The hit on the city budget is going to be about $11,000, $12,000. Minimal? It's minimal. I mean, it matters. It really matters. I mean, when we're down into those budget discussions, the department heads, where we're literally clawing out $500 here and $500 there. But there's also the expectation that even with tax stabilization, we've got some big businesses coming in. What is tax stabilization? Oh, just one of these methods and there's several options under state constructions. And this is more of a municipal construction that allows for tax incentives for businesses that might come in. You can promise them that their business personal property tax isn't going to go up for a few years. But I mean, the point is we've got some big ones coming in that theoretically this next year, when it takes effect, will more than offset that $11,000. So we should be fine. So I see it as sort of a tax shift under the folks that can afford it more off of the folks that may be struggling. Now, your office oversees land records and property records. Six years ago, how is that process for the public changed accessing land records and property records? It's very different now. I changed the electronic vendor we were working on to one that was about a third the cost, maybe more, but also just allowed for much quicker, much easier access, which enabled us to bring what was traditionally a roughly three month backlog of getting those things indexed to zero. I mean, that stuff gets put in every day. So it's in instantly. The indexes are available online. And all the actual images of the actual documents back through 93 are available online. And all the indexes of everything, including the book and page number for reference, are available back into the beginning of time, rather. Now, that's from your house or from your office? From house office. If you come into our office, if you use the system remotely, then the vendor's going to charge a certain amount of extra money for that access. And if you come into our office, you don't have to pay that. But yeah, we don't have nearly as many folks coming into the office doing title searches as we used to, because it's so easy now for them to access it remotely. So that's been great. What's coming up automation-wise in the next year or two in your mind? What are you headed to next? Well, it's interesting, because the LAN records end of things. I feel like I've hit all my goals on that. So now I'm going to take stock and see where we can improve it and sort of try to keep with the times and also see if I can shave off a little expense, which I just had. Is there any online payment that you haven't made yet that you haven't automated yet that you're looking at? Well, I was all set to automate our requests for vital documents, for vital records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, things like that. But then a couple of months ago, this state announced they were going to do it for us. Well, that's fine. So I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of time and money on that yet. So your office is looking forward to your USS Montpelier Museum. Oh, well, the USS Montpelier Museum is the one upstairs. What is your museum? My museum is a total overstatement. So I refer to it as the clerk's collection. That brings it down. That's a very salacious sound. But it's just, I mean, the thing was I realized we had some really amazing stuff in the vault that was largely gathering dust that people would love to see, but not enough to fill a room. I mean, we cleared out that digitizing everything, digitizing all our index cards. We really opened up that research room that folks use. And we painted it, put in some new tables. We made it nice. And I thought, why don't we put some of that stuff on display? And that sort of maybe thinking, well, if I put that stuff on display, it's great stuff, but it's going to cover about half a wall. So I put out the word to folks in town, let's bring in some more. And I've had all kinds of amazing, it's a little bit of an eclectic museum. Does anyone go there? People trickle in. I mean, every now and then we'll get somebody every few days who wants to come in and look at it. I actually have gotten. Does anyone look at the USS Montpelier Museum? That happens a little more rarely. But I guess that we have folks who show up to march during the 4th of July. So that'll always bring a few more people in. So we get a handful of people a year who want to go up there. And that's a little different. That's a little more run like a private collection. The door is locked. So you have to come down and you have to get one of us to go up there and unlock it for you. And then we go up and lock it behind you. But it's a really well-maintained. It's a great collection. I wish more people knew about it. Now, I'm going to go to the secret task of the Montpelier City Clerk is to maintain the Montpelier City flag. Would you explain how we came about to have a new Montpelier City flag? Oh, that's hilarious. And how the old one got into being. Yeah, well, again, one of those things that could only happen on an off-election year, where I had a little more time to breathe. But there, I can't remember. It's just a very well-known person. It was one of these TED talks that you hear that I think they played on public radio and such, where this well-known, I think he's sort of a jack-of-all-trades, but he's a vexillologist, which is, you know, someone who studies flags. No, I don't know that. Now I do know that. Yeah, I didn't know either. So one more time. That is a vexillologist. OK, you know that now. So there was this TED talk about flags, about what makes a good flag, rules for a good flag, what the qualities of good flags and the ones that have lasted over the years. And then he talked about what makes a poor flag. And his example was the Montpelier flag. So that hurt, right? Partly it hurt. It stung, but it was also educational, because as you heard folks on the council were like, we have a flag. And we do. There was one flying outside, which wasn't really thought of as a flag. And it's because many years back during a. Would you give us a word picture of what the worst flag being the Montpelier-Vermont flag looked like in the day? Well, it was a white flag with what was clearly a logo. It said, City of Montpelier established had a little background, and that's what it was. The Rose Parade wanted to have representations from all the state capitals with their flags. Montpelier didn't have a flag. And there was like no time to work one out. So they took a logo that had been designed for signs and just stuck it on a white background. What year would this have been, roughly? Oh, boy. It was in the 2000s, that's all I can tell you. Oh, OK. Fairly recent. Yeah, yeah. I think it was like 15 years ago, something like that. But I'm pulling that out of thin air, so don't pay any attention to me. So anyway, we were advised by local flag aficionados, or the city was advised, no, we wasn't, that this does not make a good flag. And it was just sort of like, well, we got to have something. Now we have something to put on the pole, and everybody forgot about it. So once we were publicly shamed in that way, and even speaking to the person who designed the logo, she was like, I wasn't supposed to be a flag, right? Then we decided to have a contest. How many entries? We had about 60 entries. We did it on the cheap, and the cheap and the quick. It was all, because I had said that I would throw it together. I've done a lot of work on the web. So I was like, I can slap something out there. What did the winner win? The winner won our undying gratitude and some nice pictures of the flag with his parents posing next to it. Now, could you describe our city flag? I know it's hanging outside. It is. I mean, it's very reminiscent of the EU flag because it's a dark blue background within the middle of Circle of Gold Stars. Now, I would say that that's our design from our original flag, the US up in the corner, that blue background, the Circle of Stars. So they got it from us, so we're just bringing it back home, right? So it's, and it's got 14 stars, which 14 is an interesting number in Vermont. There's 14 counties. We were the 14th state. So that 14 number comes up, and you know, the description. I imagine there are 14 Illuminati, someone would say. And I mean, the description from the designer, you know, he said the Circle is reminiscent of the dome. But you know, I don't see that, but it was his idea, let's go with it. And then underneath it is just a very simple sort of waving overlay of green to symbolize mountains. And it's very, very simple, but it is very evocative of mountains. You look right at it and you know what it is. And that, I think, is really what sets it apart. And I think it's really nice. We had three finalists, and that was the overwhelming winner of, you know, we had about, what was it, about 300 votes, something like that. Okay, and one of them is in your office on the wall, on the clerk's office? Yes, we have a big banner of it for events. And I believe when we're flying. Yep. Is there a third anywhere, or is it just two in existence? When we're flying, there's another one inside, because we had replaced the, there was also, by the city manager's office, there had been one of the old flags flying, so we replaced it with that. So there's three right there. But there's quite a bit more over the Montpelier flag works that can be ordered. I bought one. I have one that I fly in front of my house. Is there any discussion that that will be marched in the July 3rd parade, that the city of Montpelier will march its flag? Boy, it should be, especially since we have that big banner. We ought to, you know, yeah, hope so. I didn't really thought about that yet, but yeah. Well, that's my citizen recommendation. Well, it was last Independence Day celebration that we unveiled the winner, so it would be only appropriate to have it back out there. John, thank you so very much. I appreciate your time here, and I appreciate the fact that you're running again. It would be terrible if no one ran for city clerk. I would, that's tricky. And I want to thank everybody for watching this, but what's really important is that you watch the other shows where the races are contested because we have all of the candidates for city council. We have Anne Watson, our candidate for mayor. We have a discussion of the city budget. We have a discussion of the school budget of all of the other articles, besides John's article on personal property for businesses, and get yourself knowledgeable. Nat and Michael at the bridge have an entire issue where they're devoting to the candidates, good issue, and Times Argus is covered. Please, take your time to read this, but more importantly, get out on town meeting day and vote and have your friends vote and have your neighbors vote because that's the strength of our democracy is the participation, hopefully, of nearly 5,700 voters, which we won't have, but as many as we can have to help us make the right determinations and feel good with our determinations. And just to back that up, it's a pretty good metric, usually, to get a sense of what turnout is gonna be based on the early votes. Right now, the early votes are very low, so folks need to come out because we're looking at an embarrassingly low turnout and we can't have that happen. Absolutely. So tell your neighbors, we don't want an embarrassingly low turnout. We don't want to disappoint our city clerk, John Odom. Thank you so very much for watching.