 But Senate government operations Friday, March 26th and due to a long and extended floor session today we've cancelled everything for today except for the talking about the municipal wishlist and Senator Rom, we didn't expect you because we thought you were going to return to your Truman program, but we welcome you here, we're glad to see you. I missed it today because of unemployment and everything that was going on, so. Okay, all right, well glad to have you here with us. So committee what we'll do is I think that some of the people who are with us are people who are not normally with us. So I think that what we'll do is introduce ourselves and I'll just say off right at the start that we will take talk to people and it's more a conversational format today, but and I we do not use chat in our committee meetings, because they are sidebar conversations and we don't do those in our committee rooms so we don't use chat if there are sites that are mentioned or documents that should be noted Gail will put them up on the chat and that's the only way we use it. So I'm Jeanette White I'm from Wyndham County and I chair the government operations committee and so we'll just all introduce ourselves. Hi folks I'm Anthony Plena represent Washington County. Brian Collamore Rutland County. Allison Clarkson Windsor district and I apologize but I have to eat lunch. While we're starting this. Hi Senator Keisha Rom newest member of the Senate and committee from Chittenden County. And I also am going to eat my lunch here because we just got off the floor and we can't we can't eat on the floor so I'm going to also eat my sandwich. So when so what we've done here is last year as you know, we had what we call the pilot the municipal self governance pilot bill, but it didn't go anywhere after we left in March. So we decided that after testimony from Vermont League of Cities and Towns that the bill had become so restrictive that it really almost was meaningless because of all the restrictions that were put on there. So what we decided to do is we've done this with a couple different issues is asked for people's wish list what what changes should we make that might allow more self governance by the city's towns and villages and the way I'm looking at this and this is just my my idea but anybody can chime in here is the Charters already have ability to to set their own rules around what what they do anyway. But everybody else is governed by general law. And if there are we try to make changes in general law, but it often takes us years and years and years to do it to allow towns to have some more autonomy. And so the thought is if there are sections of general law that we should change or eliminate or somehow should just change to make it more give towns more flexibility and creativity and solving their own issues. That's that's what we're hopefully looking at here and it isn't something that's going to happen this year because we've already passed crossover, but we can start the conversation and over the summer people can continue it and in January we might have something that would be a bill that would give towns more flexibility without the the pilot project. So does that make any sense to anybody the way I explained that. OK, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it over to Gwen and Karen. And just walk us through this and start to I'm going to keep making a list here and we'll see where we go. So I may start off I'm Karen Horn with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. And we thank you so much for pursuing this conversation over the last few years. It's it's it's very important. We did just to sort of set the stage for today from our perspective. We did ask our members who would be willing to testify in the committee about issues generally that around self governance. And so we have with you folks from a number of different sized towns today who are facing a variety of challenges within their communities where they have solutions that might be affected at the local level if they have the authority to do that. I did want to mention that I'm not sure that Mayor Lott is here anymore from Winooski. She had another obligation as did Eric Wells from Williston. But there are a number of Eric was able to join. So we're only down. Oh, good. And then I was going to say when had anything else to add to that introduction. And otherwise, I think the most valuable piece of this meeting is to hear from the actual local officials. Yeah, just to know that this is not a one time conversation. Right. And that's exactly. Thank you for saying that, Senator, is that that's how we framed it to our members. So it was more and we sort of advertised as an open forum. So hopefully you'll be open to that kind of presentation. So I think other than that, we can get started. And I'm going to let you call on people if that works for you, either Karen or Gwen. That's yeah, that works. And Eric, do you still have a time constraint? Do you want to go first or? Hi, everyone. No, my meeting was canceled, but I'm happy to go first unless someone else has a. Why don't we start with you then just to set the stage. Sure. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks, members of the committee for having me on today. I had Eric Wells. I'm the town manager at Williston and I just got a few brief remarks that I'd like to make today on the subject. A town meeting 2020 Wilson voters approved a charter change proposal to enable the town by Australian ballot to menace charter to allow any measure that is granted to another municipal charter in the state without requiring approval from the state legislature. This among other charter changes approved in 2020 by the town is currently before the House Government Operations Committee. The concept is if one municipality is allowed to do something by virtue of its charter, other municipalities should be able to opt in for the same and not be subject to a legislative review. I know there's a constitutionality question of this self governance language that's coming to question by the Senate and the House. And I believe it's a good discussion to have at the legislative level. I bring this forward today, not for the discussion of constitutionality, but of the governance question of this concept. If one municipality's charter allows for something, why shouldn't another's charter allow for the same? It is if it is the will of the people of that community. And if this is not accomplished by changing a charter, what other delegation of authority by the legislature would be possible for a municipality to proceed in this manner? I just bring a couple of examples forward. Also in 2019, Wilson voters approved a charter change to move the position of town treasurer from elected to appointed. This had been a change approved by a number of other municipalities. Also in 2019, the voters approved additional changes to eliminate the offices of pound keeper, town service officer, and have the position of constable appointed by the select board rather than elected. All these changes were then approved by the legislature. Local option tax authority is another example here. Wilson currently has a local option tax allowed on sales rooms and meals by charter. Only a handful of towns currently have this revenue stream available. So in closing, whenever a municipal charter changes approved by the voters at the local level, it must also be approved by the legislature since it's a change in statute. By allowing municipalities by Australian ballot to mend their charters to allow any measure that is granted to another municipal charter in the state without requiring approval from the state legislature, it proved beneficial to expedite the process. In addition, it enables all charter municipalities the same governance opportunity by the will of their voters. I thank you for your time and consideration of this municipal governance concept. And I'm happy to answer any questions you have. That's my ability as we discuss these concepts this afternoon. Does anybody have any questions for Eric right now? OK, we'll continue the conversation. Thank you for being with us. And I'm just going to say that I went through just title 17 the other day looking for things that in general law that could be changed. And I made a whole long list of them. I mean, like, why do we tell you towns that they have to have if they have five select board members, they have to have three year terms and one year term and two year terms. And so anyway, I made a list of things just in title 17 that we should just get rid of. So anyway, so maybe Walter Martone from Springfield. Would you be going to go next? Sure. Thank you so much for allowing me to come and tell a little story about Springfield. Started over a little over six years ago. When I first ran for the select board, I did a lot of door to door visiting of people because I was brand new to Vermont, had to get my name out, had to get people to see my face. The number one thing that people complained to me about was blight in the community. They were really just very, very concerned that it was depressing property values. It was making it so that they couldn't sell their homes or get mortgages or get improvements made. And so I kind of made that my mission. And when I got elected to the select board, I immediately contacted VLCT and said, okay, I want to write an ordinance for the town of Springfield. Well, that's when I found out about Dylan's rule. I've never ever heard of it before. I've been in local government for 36 years, but it was in California. So suddenly I learned and started doing a lot of studying about it. Ultimately, what was determined that was, if this was gonna happen, we would have to go to the legislature and get something passed. So my three senators, my three representatives, we all got together, talked about developing a bill. Representative Forguides jumped on it and said he would do, he would introduce it. Got before government operations committee in the house. And there we had some difficult time. It ultimately failed on a tie vote. There were some, I thought, unkind comments made. There was some testimony made by other organizations that was not factual. But anyway, after that was over, a number of people from the committee came to me directly and said, Walter, why don't you work on putting it into your charter? This way we don't have to consider this authority for the entire state, but we can focus just on Springfield. I jumped on that, sat down and looked at what our charter, well, our charter hasn't been touched since 1986. And that last time was just to remove the local inventory tax. So really it goes back before without any amendments, probably decades before that. A lot of antiquated things in there, a lot of things that make it difficult to do amendments. However, we started plugging through that, had to appoint an 11 member committee. They took a look at it and said, boy, we got to do a lot of work on this thing. Took us nine months of working through that process. We built in the process, by the way, we found one other town that had something that looked like it could work for us as far as fighting blight. So we took that language verbatim, just changed the town name, put it in, but we also did a wholesale revision of the charter, updating language and everything else. Took it to the voters in, that was March of 2017, passed three to one. Unfortunately, our charter had two provisions in it that did not allow us to take it forward to the legislature. Number one was we had to have minimum voter turnout of the polls of 25%. We got 19 and a half. Then the second thing that's in our charter said that you can't reintroduce a charter change to the voters for three years. You have to wait three years in between any proposal. So the fact that it failed because we didn't get the required number of voters, we then had to go back and do it all over again and do it three years later. We went through another process, we made some other changes, and while we were doing that, we discovered what Williston had put in their charter and we thought, wouldn't this be wonderful if we could have had the ability to just go to our voters and say, we wanna make this change because another town already had it. So we did, and finally we brought it back and took it to the voters. It's passed again. And we're back before the legislature again. Hopefully we will get these other draconian changes in the charter approved to remove these changes for minimum requirements. The only time, it had been 10 years since we've gotten 25%. And even though we've tried to do voter, increase voter drives and things like that, the only chance that we really had of getting the 25% was at a presidential election. And that's why we finally was able to do it. And we actually wound up with 60% participation rate at that particular election. Unfortunately at our last town meeting, we were back down below 25 again. So here we are back before the legislature, finally before the legislature and hopefully minimally the provision that gives us authority to fight blight will be approved. I know that there are some issues with the ability to use other towns charters, but had we been able to do that and how we've been able to be fighting blight for the past six years, I can't help but imagine that our town would be very different right now. You know, in this recent, one of the things that happened during this whole COVID pandemic was an influx of people to Vermont. A lot of people were very interested in Springfield because of our super, super fast internet speeds. We've got internet speeds in Springfield that rival, that are better than Silicon Valley. And I came from Silicon Valley. That's where I worked in government. But we missed out on a lot of them. They came through our town, they drove through some of the neighborhoods. We don't look good. We look like we're neglected. And we're taking way too much time. We missed a real opportunity. And that's our story. And I've shown Senator Clarkson all around town. So she has witnessed this firsthand. A lot of them with factory buildings, other commercial spaces, but just neighborhoods. I think that's all I have to say right now. Thank you. So you should know that I've spent a lot of time in Springfield. So I know what you're talking about. You know what I'm talking about then. Yeah. So Senator Coulomore, wasn't there something in Rutland about, or one of your towns about Blight a couple of years ago that we tried to solve? I don't know whether we tried to solve it. The municipality itself has made the works of Western Vermont and all that kind of stuff. They've bought some of the properties, we have them and then sold them. Yeah. I don't know whether that came out of this committee or? No, I just remember something about Blight. And I thought it was somewhere over in Rutland County. Senator, I think there was a bill back in the day that addressed Blight in the Rutland downtown area. Okay. I could try and dig it up. You remember what? No, that's not necessary, thanks. Actually, I think what I'm thinking about here was in judiciary, we had some kind of a bill that dealt with abandoned buildings. And that was in Rutland and it was very different. It was, okay, thank you, I'm sorry. Senator Clarkson? Well, and again, I would just like to say this underscores our need for the Vermont Housing Investment Program because it addresses Blight. And it's a major reason that the six towns that have inspection and registry programs have it is to clean up their downtowns and to clean up major reasonings in Johnsburg and St. Albans. Blight is a huge issue and certainly in Springfield, Walter has been a champion on this. And so we're addressing it in some, in different ways in the legislature through some of our housing bills and rental housing and health and safety bills. But it would be great to enable towns to deal with it in their own ways. Good. I just wanted to say, Madam Chair, that it was nice to hear Bob Ford's guide's name. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We miss him. He jumped on this opportunity so quickly. By the time I called the meeting, he said I've already submitted language for drafting with Ledge Council and he was ready to champion it. Okay. Gwen, who do you want to go next? Julie, do you want to go next? I can. Sure. My name is Julie Hansen, I'm the new town manager here in Chester. New to this whole process. So forgive me. My issues are a little bit different. We are just when Gwen and Lee had reached out and talked about the challenges that towns are facing. I just wanted to start by thanking the Senate and the House for support and funding into various better places, grant opportunities and programs. For small communities like Chester, we're never the beneficiary of tourism dollars, marketing money. So grants and the funds that go to organizations like SRDCs and RPCs and those types of things really are critical for us. All of our village revitalization efforts have been made through those types of programs. So for your part in any of that, I just want to thank you. And one of the issues that we really are facing is dealing direct with different state agencies. We have had a number of difficulties and I don't know how much of this belongs in this particular group, but we have had issues dealing with Transportation Advisory Council. We have been working on a wayfinding plan going on almost three years now. This is just telling us where we can put town signs on town land. Which is crazy. And since COVID, this group has not met, which has delayed us an entire year again and they still have not met and we are about to miss a fourth construction season. And again, this is just putting new signage within the village on town owned property. So we're getting a little frustrated with this, but it's really been a burden and this wayfinding plan was an important plan that came about from the Village Master Plan that we had done through Better Connections Grant Money back in 2016. This was one of the initiatives that came from that and it's just really been a struggle. The other piece has been our local struggle that we have had with that 250 and I understand that probably this committee is not that group and I will be testifying to that group when this comes up again hopefully next year, but I will just say to you guys from our frustration, we have a local municipal gravel source, municipal only gravel source, zero objections from anybody in town. The all of Butters have written letters of support in favor of this. We have been with Act 250 for two and a half years and spent $150,000 on this process. It is absolutely ludicrous, very frustrating, very difficult process that we have been through for a municipal only gravel source that we have estimated would save our taxpayers in a 20-year period close to $1.7 million. The town of Chester has 98 miles of dirt road. We have 78 bridges, one of the largest in the state per capita. We are a tiny town with a lot of dirt roads. This is a vital resource for us and here we are again. They have, we had one issue we dealt with with them. It was resolved, it was remanded back to them. It has now still been two and a half months before the local commission has issued our permit. So for whatever influence you have in any of those areas, we would certainly welcome any support we could get. And again, I will be there to testify next year when this comes up. And the only other thing I throw out there is, I think a lot of towns are sharing the frustration of bearing the burden of education tax. Local municipalities like Chester that are responsible for billing and managing education tax for our taxpayers. We are on a calendar year. So we bill in July, partly in arrears. And so the requirement that we have to make the education department whole before we are billing requires a town like Chester to take out a tax anticipation note typically to pay the school, which we have no connection with. So again, it's a difficult process for small towns and for towns on calendar years. We've talked about changing to fiscal years to make that transition as difficult for a small town, financially, but it creates a lot of burden locally. It creates a lot of burden locally. Staff-wise, just time, the frustration of dealing with the state when it comes to all these homestead education stuff, listers spend months, that's all they do on an education tax that the town receives no benefit for. And I hate to offer complaints in those solutions. I don't know how this would be resolved, but it's just out there is a frustration for a small community when we have to borrow money to make another entity whole. Doesn't really seem fair. So those are just my comments and thank you so much for your willingness to listen. Well, you know that we really can't trust, I'm gonna be a little snarky here now. Go ahead. That we really cannot trust local people to know where to put signs on their own property. Okay. If you haven't already noticed, our chair is a huge advocate for local control. Well, in that particular case, I agree since all the signs are on town property, seems like we should be able to pick, but I'm sure the planning plan approved by the transportation council, information council, before we can proceed. I'm sure that you would use the wrong size and the wrong lettering and people wouldn't be able to read them and they block traffic and sorry about that. Okay. Gwen, save me here. I think the last person I see on the screen is Chris from Fairly. And a little background on Fairly, Fairly Vermont is one of those water system villages. Correct. We can't see you. That's unfortunate, but we're stuck with it. Thank you. I can't get the camera to work correctly. Okay. But anyway, Fairly is one of those water system villages you find scattered all up and down the Connecticut River Valley. And currently it's one with a water system that we're only using at about a third of its capacity. And if we're really looking at trying to do density in village settings, this is infrastructure that we're wasting because it could support far more density than it is right now. The big issue we have though is Fairly has been studied and categorized and designed and conceptualized over and over and over again, going all the way back to say 2001. And I think a big part of the reason for that is the money always can be found for $20,000 worth of study, but coming up with a million dollars for a sidewalk project is difficult. So we often feel like we get study and design and concept money thrown at us basically as a bone instead of actual infrastructure investment. And I think a big part of the issue we have on the local scale is that yes, there is the option tax, but Fairly's ascending town. And so you're asking a select board to put on the ballot a measure for people to tax themselves even more than they feel like they're already being overtaxed. And then on top of that local government, the town level is really where the voters feel like they can actually punish somebody for what they feel like is the tax burden. And so for a selectman to put an option tax on the ballot is basically politically just unviable. You're not gonna be able to do it. I think we're heading in a direction where we've legalized cannabis and eventually we'll have a system set up for taxation on that. We're already collecting meals in rooms. Eventually you're going to tax services. And actually I support that. If you're going to tax one kind of consumption, then you should make all types of consumption liable to taxation. I would like to see towns get a dedicated portion of those consumption taxes kicked back to them for purposes of capital investment, for purposes of putting together the capital funding for things like a million dollar sidewalk project or a half a million dollars worth of stormwater work or those sorts of things. And if we're talking about autonomy and we are really talking about capital planning and investing in capital infrastructure. And really what I'm advocating for is a dedicated revenue stream for the towns. We got a 6% tax rate right now. If we go to seven, kick one of that 7% back to the town. And even if you need to put strings on that as to it has to be used for capital spending, require towns to have a capital budget plan. You know, I think that would be a great idea and a good way to exercise some oversight. But right now a lot of these relatively smaller towns are just dying because there isn't the investment in the infrastructure. Thanks, but I will say that we do have a new potential, a new revenue source before us, cannabis. But at this point, you aren't gonna benefit from it at all because that's the way the bill is constructed. The way the bill is constructed, you might be able to, if we so approve in the legislature, you might be able to impose a fee on your establishments, but it's just a one time and it's gonna be a relatively small fee, but there is no provision at all for you to share in the revenue stream from this new industry. So you need to get to your legislators and change that. Well, and this is, for me, this is just a general issue that we have with the way taxation is handled in the state in general. You know, I've lived in a lot of other parts of the country and sales taxes are generally earmarked for county and local expenditures and then property taxes generally earmarked for education. And the states generally live on income taxes and corporate taxes and that sort of thing. Through just the trend toward having to fill budget gaps and that sort of thing, the state government has just become this huge Hoover that seems to suck in revenue from places that normally would have been earmarked for local expenditures on everything from education to sidewalks for that matter. And I think if we can just earmark 1% you know, use tax and so on to go into capital budgeting in the localities, I think that would go a long way to number one, taking care of problems on everything from complete streets to water quality and also give these localities a little more local control on what their streets look like and then that sort of thing. So, you know, basically I'm advocating for a dedicated revenue stream for towns that is automatic, the check comes every month, the money goes into the capital budget. So I'm just gonna share, when I was on the Punney Select Board we wanted to do a sidewalk from our village center up to our school. It's about a mile. It took us six years, six years to do it and it cost about a million and a half dollars for that one mile. And the transportation department used the exact, at that time is the exact same specs for the sidewalks as they did for the interstate highway. You had to have the, it was just ludicrous and we had a guy in town and he used to do things and then he would say, afterwards he would say, sorry, but I had to do that and I'll say, sorry. And we almost got to the point where we said we should just let him do the sidewalk, build it and then tell the state, sorry, it would have cost us about $35,000 to do it. But in fact, we have a town, a road named after him called Earl's Way because he just did it. So anyway, sorry about that, but I know your frustration. So any questions up to this point or comments or anything or Gwen? No, that was in terms of folks that could join us at this hour. So I don't know if, I know a few other folks, Eric and Walter and Julie had other things on their list. So maybe if there's time to say anything else, I think this is an opportunities. If you don't then fine, but- No, get them all out, come on. Madam chair, before we leave, Chris is concerned. I think Chris would be delighted to know that we've passed and so would Walter, although Walter can't take advantage of this. But we just passed today and Senator Rom did a great job. We have just passed in the last two days the mini TIF bill designed specifically for communities of Chris's size that would deal exactly with that issue. So we will hope that there is more infrastructure for smaller communities available soon. S33 if you wanna follow it, Chris. Good. Okay, Eric, did you have some more to throw in? No, no Senator, that was all the comments I had today on that subject. Oh, okay. Or Julie? I guess the other thing I'll just put a plug in for where is whatever involvement you do have in funding of different programs. We have all this Recovery Act money gonna be thrown at our state here soon and local governments are gonna be inflexed with this money which is a good problem to have. Our RPCs, our RDCs, VLCT are all organizations that the towns are gonna need tremendous support from. This is money we're dealing with direct from federal government so to help avoid any form of take backs or any of those types of things down the road. So I know there has been discussion about funding some of those organizations for helping municipalities along those lines and I just think that that's really critical that that piece takes place to help especially the smaller towns that don't necessarily have all the resources that maybe some of the bigger cities have. So just keeping that in mind would be great. Thanks. Thanks. So what I would suggest is that we keep and people don't have to come here to have concerns or lists or things that they would like to do. I mean, figure out how we can change the, we're gonna have less impact on funding sources. I can tell you that. I mean, we can advocate for it. And when we talk about the, but it's not called CARES money anymore. It's called RASTAR, R-STAR or something like that. ARPA, ARPA, ARPA, Rescue Plan Act. Okay, ARPA. Sounds like something you got caught in your throat. Right. And anyway. Speaking of ARPA, just quickly, Madam Chair, is every town Gwyn and Karen clear on how much money they're getting? No, this is Karen. So the final figures are gonna be put together by US Treasury in the end. And they have not done that yet. We actually heard last week that they might be waiting to use 2020 census figures, which would be problematic because they're not coming out to the end of April. But regardless, towns aren't actually gonna get any of that money before June 9th, I would say, which is the 60 days to the state plus 30 days to the towns. So there's a lot of conversation to be had. And if I could just follow on the comment that Julie made, I think this is gonna be a significant opportunity for towns to be flexible in some of the projects that they've never been able to do because the funds weren't there. And that is gonna, in my optimistic opinion, open up the whole conversation about what kinds of authority local governments need in order to actually make that happen. Yeah, and that's where we need to put, get something in place. And I think you are very, very optimistic to think that the census numbers are gonna come out the end of April. They were supposed to come out the end of March, unless they have figures that are different than we're being told that in terms of reapportionment, we're not gonna get our numbers until the end of September. Yeah. Well, I did just, I asked Jason Broughton, our state librarian, who is also our census, I don't know, fabulous person. Right. And he said that he, they were expecting that preliminary numbers for reapportionment would be out by the end of April. So that's where I got that date from. Okay. Thank you. I didn't realize that. Sorry, Walter had his hand up, so. Oh, okay. I didn't see that. Walter. Yes, just one final thing that's kind of baffled me. And after I understood more fully the whole Dylan's Rule thing and whatever, but when I went to the House Government Operations Committee and they were debating this, giving us the authority to regulate blight, there is this distrust of local governments that we're going to do the wrong thing. Someone went so far as to say that select board members are vindictive and will punish people, people they don't like. We are more accountable than any other group. If we were to do an ordinance and our voters don't like it, 5% of them can put it on the ballot and overturn it. You can't do that with state legislature. We're the only ones who have that kind of accountability. It's not just a matter of voting people out of office if you don't like them, but you can actually jump on it right away and say, and this just happened, it happened once that I knew in Springfield and almost happened again on an ordinance that I wrote about noise where a lot of people didn't like it. And they started a petition, they didn't get it done in time, they didn't get it enough signatures, but we are extremely accountable. We're not going to do something that our citizens aren't in support of. And isn't that who we're all responsible to is the voters? I mean, they're the ones that are supposedly in charge as far as my understanding is. So I'm off my soapbox. No, you're fine and I couldn't agree with you more. We, for some reason, when we get into that state house and into those nice chairs, we develop a mistrust of local government. It doesn't make any sense to me because many of us have been part of local government. But you're right, there is, and I don't get it. I don't get it. But so I also wonder, I mean, just that I'm just musing here about this. We had about five years ago, six years ago, we had a whole slew of towns. I think there might have been 20 or more towns who wrote charters only to allow them to point their auditors instead of elect them or the listers or what was it? Karen, do you remember? Well, there were quite a few that wrote charters just to appoint the clerk or treasurer. And then there were a bunch of towns that wrote charters to appoint an assessor versus having listers because they can't find any listers. So there've been a variety of them, yeah. And so we have a number of towns out there with charters that were specifically for that one thing when we could have taken care of it in general law and they wouldn't have had to go through the whole charter experience. We could have just changed the law and said it took, and we did ultimately change it, but it took us about five years to do it. So anyway, that's what I'm concerned about that. So anything else today, committee? So can you just remind me, Madam Chair, so this committee has passed out legislation before about anything that passes in another community? Okay. No, that has not ever been, I'm not sure that it's ever, it's never come to us. Okay. Gwen. I'll just jump in here. So the idea of borrowing other charter provisions started several years back and it actually kind of happened when Springfield had such trouble getting our ordinance authority added to have that kind of lighting authority. So this is a really perfect example of saying, okay, well, we'll try it one way, then we'll try it another way, but every way we go, we're reaching a brick wall. So a lot of towns that did have charters are ready because it's easier, if you already have a charter, it's easier to amend it than to create a whole new one, especially for smaller communities. A lot of the bigger communities a few middle-sized ones were thinking, hey, wouldn't it be a great idea if through our charter we could just borrow a charter provision upon vote of our electorate or our voters. And so this year, your committee will be getting several charters that are coming from the house government operations committee that had that provision initially but are going to be stripped from the charters because of constitutional questions. There's an argument that it's not constitutional to have that in a charter. There's apparently no delegation. But I think closing the loop or closing that circle, I think part of the problem is that, again, you reach a brick wall, you try going one way and saying, hey, let's go by charter. That didn't work, okay, well, let's try it again by ordinance and try to get general law. And when you go in front of the legislature and they don't have that trust of giving away that ordinance power, which is really the only powers really that would make sense to supplant some kind of provision. You have to give a clear delegation of authority. So there has to be some provision that clearly says a town can adopt an ordinance to do X, Y, or Z. So it's a matter of putting those together. But once you put it in front of the legislature and to be frank, it's not your committee. It's generally the house government operations committee. That's where the breaks are put on because they think we're not looking at through the lens of just one town or one city in their charter. We're looking for all municipalities and what could this possibly do? What harm could it possibly cause? So that's kind of the conundrum, like you're kind of damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. And we've tried several times to do municipal miscellaneous bills to sort of do cleanup language and statutes. And I can personally say that I have just stopped doing them because when they go in front of the house government operations committee, it becomes a bit of a Christmas tree bill where they start changing things and going in other directions. It almost, it becomes worse. They try to over prescribe or be more prescriptive. So it's almost better to not ask for permission because you might not like the results. And so I don't know, it's been a really, I think that's what the frustration is, is that in my seven years of doing this kind of work with the LCT, I've seen the frustration in communities where they feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want to follow the law. They want to be constitutional. They want to do what their voters want. They want to do all sorts of things, but they're just frustrated by the time it takes to get things done. And they're frustrated by the process and that they have to ask for permission for small changes. And when they do, they get a reaction similar to how Springfield got the reaction several years back, where the local officials were vilified for even asking for a certain authority. The other point I do want to make is that it's the opinion of legislative counsel that this is unconstitutional and you have great legislative counsel. We love him, but there are other opinions out there and Winooski had another opinion from their legal counsel about whether it would be appropriate and within constitutional bounds to put that kind of provision in. They checked that all out before they put the provision before the voters. I'm sure Springfield and Williston did as well, but there may be ways to get to that same kind of result without that particular language. And hopefully that's what your committee can figure out with us. Yeah, let's have Tucker come in and talk to us about that because I'm looking in the constitution and I don't know why it would be because it says to remain under the patronage or control and say, but the general assembly shall provide by general laws for the organization of all corporations. So I don't quite understand it, but we'll have Tucker come in and maybe Paul Gillies. And I don't know who else, but so in my mind, there are two things here. How do we deal with towns with charters and how do we deal with towns without charters? And personally, I don't wanna see another 20 towns create a charter just to do one thing when we could make that one change in the general law. So there are two things here, the charter towns and the towns without charters. Yeah, is that? Yeah, I do hope that at some point, Mayor Lott from Winooski is able to join you because she does have a whole different set of circumstances there in Winooski than some of our other communities. And she may bring her attorney along. So Karen and Gwen, what you need to do now is you need to get their towns to start making their little lists, figuring out what general law we need to change and how we need to do better by charter towns and have them just send the list. They don't have to come in and testify. They can just start making a list just like we did with elections. For those of you who don't know, we just did an elections bill and we asked for a wish list from people and we started off with about 125 suggestions. And we looked at all of those to see where we would go and some of them will continue to work on. But that's how I'm thinking here that we should do this, it's just starting folks. I'm coming to the Vermont House Government Operations Committee. Before we get started with... What? Today's testimony, I thought it would be helpful. I think someone's playing it on their screen, so I'm getting the feedback. Here, and what is happening? We're listening to the House Government Operations Committee. It's Kasia. It's Kasia. It's me. And I see that emails and phone calls from our neighbors, our friends. Is that Kasia? Who is somebody listening to the... I know, it stopped. It stopped. Oh, weird. That was funny. That was weird. I thought it was like the ghost of House Government Operations floating in. I know. I was a little nervous. That was a little funny. I was just looking at people who were unmuted and... So I thought maybe it was... Anyway. Anyway. All right. So does that make sense to go in that direction to just start creating a list of the things that you'd like to see and where we would have to make changes to the statutes in order to allow those changes to be made? Karen, it was me. It was me. Someone texted me their stream and it started playing and I didn't even know where it was coming from. So I just want to clear that up that it was me. I'm sorry. Does that make sense? Yes. To do that? It does make sense. Okay. All right. Thank you. And I'm sorry that it was so late today and realize it's a Friday afternoon and everybody wants to... It's sunny down here right now. No, it's pouring, pouring rain here. I'm glad in the banana belt it's sunny because... Well, it rained a little bit, but we didn't get the high winds and we didn't get the thunderstorms or electrical storms and now I can see blue sky out my window. Well, I'm glad it's your way because it's pouring here. Okay. Anyway, thank you. It's great. Thank you, Windsor County for showing up in such strength. Thank you very much, committee. I know everyone really appreciates having this open.