Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Clock, the Fish and Wildlife Department and the Agency of Ag are coming in to give us some additional information to help us with the rodenticide bill. And then we're taking other testimony this morning on a miscellaneous housekeeping bill, which we haven't looked at for a while. And then the homeowners associations on our right to grow vegetables bill. So another day where we're going to be covering quite a lot. To start things off, though, I asked Legis Council to come back in and show us an edited version of the farm worker employment bill. So we we took testimony before the break, and then we had NOFA in yesterday. Based on that and what I'm sensing from the committee, I suggested that we look at an amendment that takes the overtime piece out altogether and takes the housing survey out altogether. Not that we haven't heard that housing is a critical issue and we ideally would be investing even more money than we already are in that. But that in order to move forward, maybe we ought to focus just on the minimum wage piece. So we're just going to look at that now and not planning to vote on it. If we have time, we'll have discussion of getting a late start here recognized. But this is now a pretty short amendment, think. So if you want to bring it up on the screen.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So Sophie Sedatney for the Office of Legislative Council.

[Speaker 0]: It's also on our community page. So when this is amendment, yes, it says four zero three amendment.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Does again, I think just to reflect what the chair said, this takes out the overtime provision before there was language around overtime at sixty hours a week for agricultural workers, and it also removes the reference to the housing. So this now is streamlined. It focuses in on the minimum wage. And again, the way the minimum wage is structured in Vermont's statute is you have this definition section in section three eighty three, and then you have which defines who's covered by it, what an employee is. And then you have the actual language on the calculation of the minimum wage and the overtime. So three eighty three on the definitions. An employee means any individual employed or permitted to work by an employer except. And then right now, it excludes individuals employed in agriculture. So what this does is it limits that now by adding this language, provided the individual is the agricultural employer's parent, spouse or child. So in other words, it's now scooping in individuals employed in agriculture as being covered under this section of state law. At the request of the chair, I also included the rest of the exclusions, because I thought that would be helpful. So again, domestic service in or about a private home. And again, this just goes back. Again, this is historically, right? Domestic servants and agricultural workers have been excluded from a lot of employment laws, individuals employed by The United States. But I think pertinent for this committee is Students working during all or any part of the school year or regular vacation period. So again, that's a general exclusion of students from the definition of employee for purposes of minimum wage and overtime across all occupations. And then section three eighty four, because you've now under

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Can I just explain question?

[Speaker 0]: Yes. Yeah. Go ahead.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: So are you saying we're creating that excluding youth, or we're just keeping it as it already is? This is already the existing testing. We're not changing that. Right.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: The only the only change would be that the underlined bit up here, which says any individual employed in agriculture, provided the individual is the agricultural employer's parent, spouse or child. So in other words, all other agricultural employees would be now covered. So then going to the subsequent sections

[Speaker 0]: Another question.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: We've had this before, but does student ever get defined? We have questions about that.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. So there are labor laws, both at the federal level and at the state level. And those are child labor laws, so those are done by age. Student itself is not explicitly defined. I think it's been understood to refer to students as in minors, like under the age of 18, those that are attending school. And again, there are rules around what you can do as 13, 14 year old, a 15, 16 year old, a 17, 18 year old. And I can share those with the committee if you're interested. I know not today. So this is the current law on minimum wage. So again, it's an employer shall not employ an employee. So again, now you've brought in agricultural workers as an employee. And then what Vermont does is it has this calculation that's done each year. So right now, the current state minimum wage for 2026 is $14.42 an hour. And that gets calculated each year. Usually towards the end of the year, gets posted for January 1. And then under subsection B is where you get into overtime, and you say that employees will be paid one and a half times their regular wage rate. And then there's a list of exclusions. Because you've now added agricultural workers into the definition of employee, you then have to take them back out again as being covered by the overtime provision. So what the new number nine does here is it excludes individuals employed in agriculture.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I wonder

[Speaker 0]: if it would be helpful to see what one through eight are there. So what other

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: employees So

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: it's typically ones that are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is the federal law. And so you may have heard the expression exempt, nonexempt employees. So nonexempt employees typically are covered, get overtime, whereas exempt employees do not. So it's the administrative, professional, it's all those long lists. And I can certainly provide that. I could include it in here if you want.

[Speaker 0]: Maybe. I don't know whether

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I can pull that up in a second if you And want when I finish going through then this would provide that the act would take effect 01/01/2027. Usually with any minimum wage laws, they go into effect January 1. And this would also provide time for individuals impacted by the change to prepare for that. And then the current name of the bill doesn't really fit what you're now doing, so this recommends that the title of the bill be amended to read an Act relating to payment of minimum wage to agricultural workers, to reflect what it actually would do.

[Speaker 0]: So that's it. We've gotten to the end. Yes. I think we should talk about the housing deduction because that's a concern. And Sophie and I were just downstairs speaking about this bill in the housing committee in a drive by situation. The. As I understand it, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but if. An employer is paying, and I'm going to make this a general example, so not an agricultural example, but an employee has housing. And if an employer is paying $17 an hour, let's say, to an employee, and they're also providing housing, that the employer can deduct a certain amount for housing, and it's established in law. And once they make that deduction, they still have to be over minimum wage. Is that how it works?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. So if you deduct for meals and lodging, the employee still has to be receiving minimum wage. They can't go below minimum wage.

[Speaker 0]: So the the amount in their paycheck has to be above minimum wage.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Right. K. Even if even if you're supplying

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: full house and heat and lights

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: That is. If you have an employee living in a ranch house with his family and the ranch house would run out for $2,000 a month, that doesn't count towards his weight.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: He still has at least make minimum wage.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That is my understanding that you're still required to provide the minimum wage. Let me double check on that. So many bits of paper on this. An employer may apply wage deductions as follows. And then there's a list. An employer may deduct for goods or services provided by the employer to the employee if the following conditions are met. The deduction does not reduce an employee's wages below the hourly minimum wage.

[Speaker 0]: So what you've put up on the screen here says effective January 2026, employer shall be entitled to deduct from the wages and allowance for meals and lodging actually furnished and accepted as follows. And then we see a breakfast number and a lunch number and a dinner number that are whatever they are. I think that we've seen numbers and we've talked about school meals that are sort of in this fall. And prisons. Yeah, yeah. And they seem like almost impossibly low. And we know that some schools struggle, but they do manage to produce for an entire group of people breakfast that might cost $3.92 Lodging, dollars 5.41. To have seems to not fall into that category. I I don't know what it costs to lodge in prison or in the correction system, but I believe it's more than that. Can you say a little bit about where this number comes from?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. So it's calculated every year, again, just like the minimum wage. And again, it's in statute. The Department of Labor is directed to do this each year, and then this is the formula that they use, again, since 2009. So it's both in statute directing the Department of Labor to do it, and then it's in the Department of Labor's rules.

[Speaker 0]: Representative Lipsky.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: So you're telling me that the consumer price index since 01/01/2009 brought that room up over eighteen years, up to $5 a night for a wound.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I'm not sure where it started at, but 41. It started Very low. The box in $9.40. Right.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah. Think that's absurd. My property taxes should

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: be a lot lower. Well, I'm just wondering also if these numbers are Farmers are aware of these numbers, if there might be unintended consequences with this where farmers start paying minimum wage, then they start charging for this or just take it away because it's not worth it.

[Speaker 0]: This meeting, housing?

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Housing and food, yeah. I mean, it's so low that if you were a farmer, you're like, I'm gonna pay you $20 an hour, but you gotta find your own housing and your own food.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: So

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I can rent my houses out and make enough money to make up the wages.

[Speaker 0]: So basically what this is saying, if you can go back to that slide, just go down rather a little bit. So what this is saying then, again, repeating I think what you just said, but when you deduct $5.41 from the daily paycheck, whatever number you arrive at has to be would have to be the minimum wage per hour.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So right now, for agricultural employees, would be governed by the federal minimum wage. So at the federal level, agricultural workers are entitled to the federal minimum wage. They're not entitled to the federal overtime. So right now, yeah, and again, that's at a very low rate. I think it's $7.25 which it's been since 2009. So yeah, right now you could probably afford to do this. I would say when there was the study group on agricultural workers, I think if I recall some of the testimony was along the lines of what Representative O'Brien mentioned, which was just shifting how much Instead of paying this, then we're just going to reallocate things this way to make adjustments for that. So maybe they haven't been charging this, but now they would consider charging it.

[Speaker 0]: John,

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: I'm getting more and more confused. This bill then adjust the minimum wage based on Vermont's minimum wage. Right.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Which is $14.42.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: So if you're paying the minimum wage, but you're providing housing, you're paying the minimum wage, but you can deduct from the pay that amount.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Right.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: But you still can't go below the minimum wage, the state minimum wage.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: But you are going below because you're paying them less than, you're paying them the minimum wage, but their check is lower than their minimum wage. Is that right?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Well, currently, I mean, again, the testimony has been that often people are paying above minimum wage. But right now, you're legally required to be paying agricultural workers the federal minimum wage, and you have the right to deduct this. But whatever you do, you cannot go below the minimum wage.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: They keep saying that and

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: it keeps putting me right back where I was. You can't go below it, meaning they've got to get that much in

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: their paycheck. They have to receive the minimum wage in their paycheck.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: Even if they're getting the housing.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. So if you're paying them more, can More than the minimum wage, you can then deduct an amount for the housing. Again, if there's board as well, you could deduct for that.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: So if you're the farmer and you're paying only minimum wage and providing housing, you get nothing for the housing.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right, you wouldn't be able to charge for this.

[Speaker 0]: So I think that this is probably set up at some point way back when to prevent employers from taking advantage of their employees by saying, here, I will pay you $10 an hour and you get housing, which I'm going to deduct something for that. And they could deduct whatever they wanted. So this would have set up some sort of a limit. But as representative Lipsky says in '29, it might've been $3 a night. And how could anybody have thought that was a reasonable number? Anyway.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I would expect in the good, bad old days, whatever, things like the script and the company towns where people really were restricted in what they were able to do. So a lot of these rules around what employers can deduct, I think stems from that era.

[Speaker 0]: Go ahead, Chittenden.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: What's the federal minimum?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: 7.25. 14.42 at the moment. But that does, again, not guaranteed to go up. I guess it depends on what happens with the consumer price index. I don't want to assume anything these days. But typically that goes up each year, whereas the federal minimum wage has not moved since 2009. So it's a much more static number.

[Speaker 0]: Representative Bartholomew?

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: So I'm I'm still just trying to understand, I think, the same thing that John's struggling with. So if we change the policy if we change the law so that it's gonna all farm workers will get Vermont minimum wage, Can a farmer then deduct the 112.41 because the federal minimum wage still would be, like they would still be above the federal minimum wage. So that like in terms of the payment, they'd be getting Vermont's minimum wage. But in terms of the technicality of of the being able to deduct room and board, they could do it because they're actually would it would be it. They would be receiving more than the federal minimum wage.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I think if you say that they're going to be covered by the state minimum wage, then this would require that they be paid the state minimum wage and that they receive at least the state minimum wage even after any deductions for this? I don't know that you could change that.

[Speaker 0]: I think it's so confusing to me, I think I was misinterpreting the statute when we had this conversation previously. It almost seems as though that whatever amounts here are irrelevant, because if would irrelevant, if minimum wage applies, we would be saying the paycheck has to be the minimum wage. And if you're providing lodging, you're providing lodging, it doesn't make any difference, and it really doesn't matter what numbers are up here. Am I getting that right?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: If you were paying minimum wage, yes. If you were paying more than minimum wage, then you would be able to take the deduction as long as you don't bring people down below the minimum wage.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: So is the reverse also true where if I was the farmer paying my ag workers Vermont minimum wage, could I then charge them rent at these rates And not be run afoul, essentially, of Vermont's

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I think it depends on whether the housing is connected to the employment. If you're only in the housing because you're employed there, then this would apply. If you're choosing to you have a property that you're choosing to rent out and you have an employee that lives there, you can charge them the fair market rent. But then if they lose their job, they wouldn't automatically lose their housing. They would still have the right to remain in that housing. They'd be subject to the same landlord tenant rules around that. So I think as long as you're requiring or making available housing with the job, like this job comes with housing, then this applies. If you've separated the two, then you could do the fair market rental for the housing.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Could you do farmer employer rates here also when it comes with the housing? If you work on my farm, I'm going to pay you Vermont minimum wage and you get housing, but it's sort of a very low rental per week or month.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: You could do that again, as long as they're getting paid the minimum wage. But again, if the housing is not connected to the job, I think you would have to have that separation. Even

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: when it is connected. So say you're 112 a week, so if it's, I'm going to pay you minimum wage, but I'm going to essentially, you have to pay $500 a month for room and board.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Not sure I'm understanding what the difference is. If they're working for you and the housing is connected to the job, then you can deduct again for the full room $32.56 a week, as long as that deduction doesn't push them below the minimum wage, the payment of minimum

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: wage. So I think, basically, it sounds like if we make it required that agricultural workers get the minimum wage and we have farm workers who are living in farm worker housing, I mean, I just did the math and it's it's $2.81 would be the amount you could deduct from a forty hour work week in terms of coming up with that 112 figure. So basically we're requiring farmers to provide housing, not only to meet minimum wage, but actually to also pay almost an extra $3 an hour because they're not able to get the deduction from the rental costs. So basically we're saying, I think that this feels like surprising news to me. Did you know these people?

[Speaker 0]: Well, not exactly, no. I think that we're looking, we're really not talking about the bottom line, full room and board in most cases.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Think we're talking about a full room. So we're not talking

[Speaker 0]: about food. We're about lodging. So it may be even worse than you're describing Michelle. So I think what we should do is stop here. I think we've all sort of gotten to a point where we're- Confused. Are you up? Is your day, I know that everybody's busy now, are you tied up?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I'm pretty much tied up all day today.

[Speaker 0]: So I wanted to find you just a chat at lunchtime, or are you tied up then too?

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I have an agenda planning meeting with a committee at lunchtime, but I'm not sure if they will be doing that or not. But just let me know and I can come back up here at noon or whatever and see.

[Speaker 0]: Okay, good. I'll try and track you down. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for coming in.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: You're very welcome.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: One more thing, Sophie. I'd love to see the federal, both the wage and the benefits that come with H2A workers would be interesting to compare. That's the same thing, you can't go below a minimum.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. And they've now added in that you can take a deduction for housing as well. So that's a new thing that came out with their interim final rule in October, which previously you didn't. It was like you had to provide the housing and the wage.

[Speaker 0]: All right, thank you.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: All right.

[Speaker 0]: So we're going to keep going here just to stay on track and switch gears over to H758, which is the act relating to brand use of her dental slides. We had some testimony before our break from the Agency of Agriculture, and today we have those folks back along with Department of Fish and Wildlife. So welcome. And our committee assistant is here virtually today rather than here. But if you need assistance with putting anything up on the screen to make that happen. So John, are you gonna start off? I would introduce the topic of the team and turn

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: it over to our presenters. If it's okay with the committee, perhaps Grie or Doctor. Renfrew can pick up on setting up

[Speaker 0]: while I walk the introduction, just mindful of time. Yes, that's absolutely, absolutely fine. Thank you for being efficient.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: You'd like two chairs up there?

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Do you want them both be up front? Why don't we do that?

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah, you can use that crown.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: And an extra chair.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: If you want to bark.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Thank you. Or Doctor. Renfrew, of course. The older person.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Okay.

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Well, good morning, everyone. My name is John O'Brien. I am the director of the wildlife division with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. Have a few of you this morning. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about HCP-seven58. With me this morning is my team. I have Doctor. Rosland Renfrew, who is the Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, and Ms. Breed Furpe, who is our Fur Bear project leader. They're here today to share with you our current understanding on science of presence of rodenticides in wildlife and what we know and what we don't know regarding the effects of that exposure. I want to acknowledge our colleagues from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. They'll introduce themselves, of course, but I just want to note we are here in the spirit of interagency collaboration, together to address shared interests around an important topic. And then before I turn it over to Doctor. Renfrew, I just want to make clear that from the standpoint of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, we remain concerned about the presence of these poisons in the food chain. There's a lot that we still don't know. I think that we collectively agree, is with our partners from the agency of agriculture, that more needs to be done to try and reduce the exposure of these substances in the environment and in our wildlife food chain. So with that, I'll turn it over to Doctor. Renfrew. We'll go from there.

[Speaker 0]: Thank you, John. Good morning. Good morning.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Just need a second to set up. Okay. Well, thank you for having us today. Appreciate the time. Look forward to your questions.

[Speaker 0]: If you want to broadcast something on the screen behind you, you'll need permission to share. And if you don't have that, just say so out loud and it will happen.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Oh, I wish everything worked that way.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Absolutely.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Look at that, it

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: happened. Yeah. And get it into Powers the A. Again.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Oops, did not want to do that. Trying to be able to see my notes.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: See if I can do this one more time.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: I guess that's not gonna work.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Bear with me.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: Push escape and just have a smaller screen. If you your text will be at the bottom, but then we'll see it too. So I don't know if that's all.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yeah. That's okay. I might just try without notes. And if I stumble a little, that's should work. It's worked in the past.

[Speaker 0]: We're forgiving of stumbling, so.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: I appreciate that.

[Speaker 0]: I think, yeah, I think, representative Bartholomew is right, if you're screen sharing, we're gonna see whatever's on your screen.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yes, there we go. Great,

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: thanks for your patience. So for the record, my name is Rosalyn Renfrew, and I'm the Wildlife Diversity Program Manager at Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. And I really appreciate you being interested in this issue and inviting us here to talk today. So I was asked to speak about rodenticides in birds, specifically in birds of prey. And I know you've heard testimony from several rehabilitators. I haven't watched all of that testimony, so I apologize in advance if I repeat anything. The issue in Vermont is that we have studies. We have these observations from rehabilitators, but we don't have studies looking at the bigger picture. And so what I thought might be helpful for this group is to do some literature search, look at studies that offer a broader perspective on what's going on with the rodenticides and raptors. And I focused on the second generation rodenticides, which hopefully this committee is really Sorry,

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: that was me.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Committee is really used to

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: I was trying to figure this out.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: Mute yourself. There

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: we go. Testing.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Okay, we're good. Really used to hearing the word escar. I'd like to just use that terminology to avoid a lot of extra. Second generation anticoagulant rodenticides. I'm So not a toxicologist. I've dabbled in it a little bit because my background's in bird research and conservation, so I have some understanding. But if you haven't already, I would recommend having a toxicologist come in and talk. And I understand one of the committee members here might be a toxicologist. I don't know which one. I haven't met you all before. So I wanted to present what I could find from the literature, especially the recent literature, about the state of the knowledge and what's missing from that knowledge. So what I found was that most studies are conducted in The US and Canada, Europe, Australia. There's a few studies elsewhere in the world, but this

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: is where the

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: majority come from. And rhodificum is the most commonly found compound in the livers of raptor species. And it's usually present in these studies in more than eighty percent of birds that are looked at. Again, this is all based on birds that are brought into rehab facilities or already found dead. And one thing to be aware of is that this is what we have to work with, the birds that are brought into these centers. It is not representative of the population as a whole. We're getting a biased sample in that data. It doesn't mean that is not meaningful data. It's all we have is to be looking at the livers of these birds that have died. Blood tests are not. They can indicate exposure potentially. I think they're still working on refining those tests to be more accurate, But they don't represent the cumulative effect of multiple exposures, which is important in a compound like this that can accumulate in a bird's liver. And so that idea of one exposure versus multiple, it's really hard to know what the bird experienced. And so you come in with a toxicity level in the liver, you don't know how the bird got to that point. But blood tests generally test what's happened very recently in terms of exposure, and livers are better for representing the entirety of their exposure to a compound. So of those that come in and test positive for escaras, onethree to twothree tend to be exposed to more than one of those compounds, which we know increases their risk if they're exposed to multiple different compounds, because that means they've had multiple exposures.

[Speaker 0]: Got a question here for Jim Bartholomew.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: What is that that you say is commonly found? I don't know what is, is that a Protifecon? Yes.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: So that's one of the several escar that is used presently, and it's one that's used it it's very commonly used, and it also happens to be more toxic than the other compounds in general to wrap this These are all I'm just talking about the second generation today. And what we do know is that the effects of these compounds really vary among species, groups of species and species of birds. They all have different diets. They have different ways of processing the toxicity, and they may pick up the compounds at different levels in different environments depending on the habitats they use. So it's really hard to draw broad generalizations, but you would need a lot of studies in order to be able to get down to the species level in terms of the birds that are living out in the wild and figuring out what's going on with them.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Have studies been done on some lethal effects on these raptors? And also, is it passed on to eggs and ticks?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: So I can answer the first question, and I'll be getting to that. That's actually a big focus of what I'll talk about. So if you want to see if that gets at your question, I'll continue on. The ways that raptors are exposed, I think you've already learned a lot about this consuming target and non target rodent species. The contaminant can be spread out of the boxes or treatment areas through the rodents themselves or through scavengers. And there is some evidence of being exposed through invertebrates, especially for songbirds house sparrows, which are not a native species, but I guess they will go into the boxes. So you can have this cascading impact through invertebrates, although that hasn't been studied much and it hasn't been of most concern. So, there's a lot of studies that have just looked at the proportion of raptors that have been exposed. And these are just two that I pulled out for no particular reason. They just seem to have decent sample sizes. And so, as an example, percent of raptors exposed was ninety two in Australia and seventy four in Canada. And of those, 38% and fifty percent were exposed to multiple compounds. You can see that at the top there, the number of birds that were evaluated. Again, these are all birds that came into rehab centers or were found already dead. And the environments that these studies took place in, the environments that these birds came from really varied. So it encompassed a lot of different kinds of land use. In Canada, the highest proportion of birds exposed was in suburban and intensive ag areas. And this is one positive note that I'll share is that in Western Canada, there was a policy change in 2013 where they reduced the levels of the brodificam, that more toxic compound, and increase the levels of the other types of escaras in terms of what was used in the landscape. Thank you. Found actually a couple of species, owls, they found lower levels in their livers after that reduction. So to me, that indicated, okay, this can work if you reduce what's used. Can be reflected in the raptors, and that's an important finding and an important bright light in terms of the possibilities. So the majority of studies have focused on that top box of are the S stars present in the birds or not, the birds that are coming into rehab centers and such. What would be more helpful or additionally helpful is to know what levels are we seeing that are what is the threshold for a lethality? At what point, what level of concentration in the liver causes mortality. And then also very hard to study are the sublethal effects because oftentimes we're never going to see the birds experiencing sublethal effects. They may not die, or if they do die, we may not find them, And they may die of other causes because they become vulnerable due to the pesticide exposure. They become compromised in some way and then they die from some other cause. So that's a really hard one to get at.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Nelson? Yeah. How was our population of raptors? How was our population? Eagles have been delisted now. How was our population of other raptors?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: In general, it depends on the species. Cooper's hawks and sharpshooten hawks are doing pretty well. They've kind of come back post DDT era, and also they seem to be coming more acclimated to coexisting with humans on the landscape. So they're having good success. Goshawks, there's some questions about how they're doing, and that might be due to competition from other raptors. Habitat changes. I don't think we know the answer, and there is research and monitoring going on right now around those species. Owls, again, it depends on the species. Some have done well, others have declined. And the caveat I wanna give you is that we don't have really good monitoring efforts that get at these population trends for raptors at a more local level. So we have the Breeding Bird Atlas, which covers the whole country. And if you take all the data together, you can say generally, how are owls or how is this species of hawk doing writ large? But for Vermont, we don't have the fine enough scale surveys to really get at population changes. The one exception would be the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas, which we survey the whole state, and we look at just presence of the species across our landscape, But those are such big projects. They're only done once every twenty five years. So you can look at, and we're actually coming up on our next one, we're starting to get ready for it. So we have data from back in 2003 to 2007 collected back then on them. We're about to do the next round. But even if you saw an increase or a decrease, you're not looking at necessarily what the underlying cause is. And obviously, there's a lot of other things that impact bird populations. So it can be very hard to tease out these population level impacts. But ultimately, that's really what we're looking at fish and wildlife, where nobody wants to see any raptor exposed to toxicity to the level where they die or experience sub lethal effects.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: It's a dry rule.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Thank you. I just don't wanna have this

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: in my mouth while I'm talking.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Doctor Renford.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: These raptors, except for the barred owl that was sitting on my clothesline over the bird feeder for a mouse that came out this winter in the daylight. Most of these raptors are migratory. They don't hang out here, but only for four or five months at the most, the rest of the time they're elsewhere. So we don't know if you're in your studies that they were exposed to

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: the rodents

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: here in Eschar here or elsewhere.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Well, this is true. You you can't really separate that out without doing a study specifically looking at that. I have not seen studies doing that, but that said, it depends on how long the effects of the compound last in the liver, how fast the bird processes it. So you may, if you're testing birds during the breeding season while they're here, whether or not their liver concentration reflects what happened three months ago when they were moving from the South, mean, I that's something a toxicologist could speak to. I'm not prepared to yeah. So see. So here's some studies in the lab that you always start in the lab. You look at birds where you can have controlled experimental situation. You dose them. You find out what the impacts are. They often use quails, mallards, and chickens. These don't relate well to exposure in raptors. They just process things differently. Fortunately, they did do some studies with hawks and owls, or kestrels and owls, at least. And long story short, they came up with this number of one hundred to two hundred nanograms per gram of liver. And that's the area at which they think that eschar has become lethal, potentially lethal, and they also note that there may be liver damage, but you may not see that in a live animal. So you can't necessarily look at an animal and say whether or not it has liver damage, and that's important as well. It makes it harder to figure out what's going on in the wild. Also, these studies are limited because in what they call free living birds out in the wild, they're subject to a lot of other stressors that can confound with the impacts of any kind of contaminant. So you can have them more susceptible or more impacted by a certain level in the liver compared to lab animals. So again, this is the number that they came up with as their best guess at where the eschar has become a problem for these species. And of course, that level is going to vary based on the species, the timing, their diet, their age, their behavior, their habitat, their level of nutrition, all kinds of other factors. But they have to go with something. And so studies have applied that threshold and looked at how many of the birds coming into rehab facilities are above or below that threshold to kind of take a guess at what the potential mortality could be in raptors. And so this is just a handful. There's fewer of these studies, and this is a handful of results from different places. So Australia found that about half of the birds that they looked at with exposure were above these levels. Another study in Texas found that half of the birds that came in were exposed, period. And then a quarter of those were tested at potentially lethal levels in that 100 to 200 range. In Europe, sparrowhawks, this was a big study over a long period of time. They found that there was a lot of birds exposed, but that all of them were below these lethal levels. So you can see how these studies really vary. It's very hard to take away one conclusion because we're still learning so much about this.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Representative O'Brien. Are there any patients that have banned escar and so they can study either post eschar and they never actually had rodenticides like this to begin with and see what Compare that health of those raptors to raptors here for example.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yeah, that's a great question. I looked more into just impacts on birds. I didn't look so much into policy, except for that one example in Canada where they didn't ban them, but they changed which compounds they were using. So maybe there's someone else in this room that can speak to other countries and their policies. I haven't gone into that yet. Sorry.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: What are some of the other sort of existential stressors on the raptor population now? If it's cumulative, raptors are F-35s, everything has to work really well, and then they survive. So if you just start tweaking here and there.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Do you mean Or are

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: there other toxicities out there?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Lead can be a toxin, and perhaps that interacts with exposure to escaras as well. So they could be exposed to lead through capture of prey that have lead. I'm not aware of anything currently that's on the radar for exposure, but I'm probably missing something. But there's nothing that I'm aware of that's on the radar in a big way, at least not in our region.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: So we haven't seen declines in some of these records the way I know things like evening gross beaks are down some enormous amount, like 40%. You almost don't really know why. There similar things with raptor populations?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: There are some species that have declined, and there's theories posited about why. And again, it's hard to pinpoint. A lot of it is just carrying out logical exercise of changes. A lot of times, it's changes in their habitat or changes in competition or the other raptors. So there's those kinds of dynamics all the time. This, as an alternative to relying on the lab studies, there are a couple of studies at least that used wild birds and asked a slightly different question that helps inform us. They compared the eschar levels in the livers of birds that were determined with pretty good certainty to have died from that exposure to the escar, and they compared that to other raptors and their liver levels that died due to other causes, And using that information, you can actually create a model to help predict at what level a bird is likely to die and what is the likelihood that it will die, so the risk to the bird from a given level found in the liver. So on the top, you see on the top and the bottom of that graph, you see a bunch of gray circles. That's the actual data. So up at the top are the raptors that were found to be diagnosed as having died from exposure. At the bottom are all the ones that were diagnosed as having died from some other cause. And so when run the model, and it's hard to imagine just looking at this graph, but you run a model and you can get a continuum of the probabilities of death based on the exposure to a compound. And this study took all the escars and just combined them. So we're not getting at the different levels of toxicity from the different compounds, but it is a general look at escars overall. This was done in The UK with a couple of species. I'm just showing one of them. And so if you follow along, the x axis is the liver concentration, the residue in the liver, and on the y axis is the probability of death given that level of exposure. And so if you follow along in the green on that x axis, the probability of death is zero. All those levels of exposure are not causing mortality. You get up above 50 and you start seeing the curve go up, that means that the probability of mortality starts increasing. And so what they concluded was that, well, at around fifty five, instead of the one hundred to two hundred, around fifty five, you'll start seeing some probability of mortality. And so this is giving us a little more information. It's also saying that for this particular species and for the whole combination of escarz, that one hundred to two hundred gram threshold may be too high. They may be dying at lower levels. But it also says that this all depends on risk. Are you okay with saying, okay, five percent mortality is an acceptable risk or one percent is an acceptable risk? Certainly fifty percent, probably for most people, would not be an acceptable risk. So it comes down to a risk analysis, and that's what I think a lot of this comes down to, actually.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Thank you, Chittenden.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Red kites are lily bitty bitty bird aren't they?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: They're smaller, yeah.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. So fifty nanograms per gram in the liver on a lily bitty bird would be different than on a

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: One can assume that. Yep. Just an example of this approach. So I'm not trying to extrapolate to other species. That's a good point, though.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I'm picking up what you're laying down. I

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: think you need

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: to understand it as well.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: This is a similar study, but I thought was more helpful because it does separate out three compounds they were interested in looking at. So you can see

[Speaker 0]: the three. Is that

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: visible? It's a little small. So, bradyficum, bromadiolam I'm going to just destroy these words bromadiolam, diphthiolam. Based on similarities. And so that's really helpful. They had a bigger sample size to work with. They were very careful to only use postmortem exams that were carried out by certified vets. So they had a high level of certainty of the diagnosis. And so same thing, they looked at liver levels for those diagnosed with having died from a compound versus those diagnosed having died due to some other cause. And so they ran the model. They generate this curve. The curve is on a log scale. It's a little hard to interpret directly. But the curve there shows the differences you can see among the different compounds, the different levels of effects that would be predicted. And again, this is predictive model. It's not necessarily truth. But in table two is what I really wanted to focus on, which shows that for these groups, they're actually saying that if you want to look at a five percent chance of mortality, that you would actually have to allow a much lower level of exposure to these compounds by quite a bit. And so these birds were collected in various sites in both Canada and The US. It represents a lot of different places. But it gives us an overall picture of what levels are Okay. It's going to vary from study to study. It's going to vary depending on the species. But we'll see what other studies come up with. I'm sure there's more going on. This is a very large data set. It's using a lot of the data that already exists out there. But it's becoming more conservative about what levels are allowable. And again, not a random sample. There's bias. This is opportunistic sampling. So this isn't somehow relating to what the overall populations are experiencing. This is just trying to get at what levels cause mortality.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Are there certain species of raptors that never aren't interested really in house mice or Norway rats, you know, that just the sort of merlins or kestrels that might just like chickadees and goldfinches. I'm just wondering, it's not like turkey vultures or bald eagles, right? Easy things, they're opportunists, whatever, because they're peregrines. I can't imagine a peregrine diving 200 miles an hour, they pick off a house mouse that has just been in a predator sized office.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yeah, so there are and that's why these groupings are what they are. So the occipiters, that first column of birds you see, they eat birds mostly. They might eat other things as well. But like Cooper's hawk and sharpshed after birds quite a bit. They don't go after mammals. The peregrines go after birds almost exclusively. They're not going to be eating other things. They'll grab a dragonfly once in a while, actually. But the owls, of course, most of the owls that we have are focused on the mammals. But they're also bigger. So you can see that the toxicity allowable level, if you want to call it that, is higher for owls. So yes, and I wonder if you're getting at, can we look at the population trends of these species that are eating birds and other things versus those eating mammals? You could. Again, there's a lot of other factors influencing their population trends. It's No hard to get

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: matter what the levels of eschar in them means that whatever prey they ate had to be exposed to rodenticides. So like a barred owl and top of camel's thumb is going to be exposed to rodenticides the same way one might be at Willis then, right?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Correct. One would expect it's going to be in areas of concentrated human activity of some sort. And I think that's what they've found, and maybe my colleagues in the ag department can speak to that a bit. So that's all I have for all the technical stuff. I just threw these out off the top of my head of all the information needs. There's a lot we don't know. And I won't go through all of this, but it's just an example of the things I'd love to know to help inform our interests and how we want to handle this issue. But on the other hand, do we want to wait for all that research to do something? I think we're ready to do something now, and it's a matter of what that is.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Do have any questions?

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: Two questions. I'm curious, you mentioned earlier invertebrates. How in the world would these compounds get into invertebrates? Through invertebrates? Would it get into, you said if something eats invertebrates, these compounds can appear. How did it get into the invertebrate?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Well, what I'm aware of is the case of a house sparrow. They can fit into and will go into the boxes to eat snails and things like that, or maggots. They could eat maggots on a carcass. And so they can pick it up that way. Again, I don't think Are this is

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: the feed and the actual entrails.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: They're eating the invertebrates that are scavenging on the dead small mammals.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: So the information you're providing is just reinforcing what we've heard is that there is an effect in wildlife and birds. So do you have any recommendations and what do you think we should do since you're here?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: That's a big question. That's something that I think we need to actually figure out collectively. I am not an expert on the other end of things, the use of the pesticides, the alternatives. One thing that I'd love to see, but I don't think we're going to be able to get at, is that nexus of we're talking about how they're used more often in environments where there's more people, there's more need for them. I'd love to be able to learn more about what raptors are using those areas and what is the nexus between use and exposure, and be able to do that for Vermont in our place so that we're not just relying on these big broad studies, but that we actually understand our own landscape.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: New York City skyscrapers.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yes, but they're eating pigeons, so they're probably okay.

[Speaker 0]: Perfectly awesome.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah, I

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: was just going to say, can't recall exactly when the testimony came in, but we have heard from people who did studies, not of birds. I mean, we have heard of people who did studies of birds too, but Vermont specific data about mammals in Vermont. And I recall with fishers in particular, they said there was an extraordinarily high incidence. Is that Are you the fisher person?

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: This is a perfect Some

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: of the question that Richard was asking about in terms of, well, maybe the birds got it somewhere else, maybe, but the mammals probably were here. So anyway, if you're gonna remind us, great. Yep.

[Speaker 0]: Just wanted to do a time check. We're about out of time So miss I'm not sure who else wanted to share anything.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Okay. I'll do my best.

[Speaker 0]: John, yeah.

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Thank you, mister chair. I too am mindful of time, and this is clearly a very complicated topic, I wonder if perhaps this for me to be a start, but there's a lot of information yet to go through, and you do need to hear from our colleagues from the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, because it's an important background in terms of what has been going on and what has already been done that needs to be part of the conversation. So perhaps there could be another opportunity for us to come back. Yeah. So we're

[Speaker 0]: about out of time both on the flock and on the calendar just because we have a crossover date looming. We do have time this afternoon, and we've got some time blocked out for this bill for committee discussion. We could certainly, if folks are available, have you come back in between two thirty and 03:30?

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: I'm supposed to pick up a rooster, but

[Speaker 0]: Why don't we get

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yes. Very close to Why

[Speaker 0]: don't we, while we have you here, why don't we just see what we can do? And we'll maybe ask the committee to hold questions and tell us what you can in a few minutes.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Yeah. I believe Oh, Well, for the record, my name is Brianne Furfee. I'm the Fur Bear products lead for Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. Let me make sure that I know how to sign in here and try to make this as fast as possible.

[Dr. Rosalyn Renfrew (Wildlife Diversity Program Manager, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: The good thing about Brie's information is that she actually does have data from Vermont. That's good on Unlike birds, where you're just using these other studies, so it's helpful.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Let me see, share screen. All right. Perfect. Well, so to do this in maybe five minutes, I do want to emphasize that this isn't a problem only in Vermont. This is a problem throughout the Northeast. It's a problem throughout America. It's a problem in other countries. We're not the only state that's encountering this issue. The good news, as Doctor. Redford said, that, yeah, we have some data to work with, and we are going to continue to collect data to refine some of the questions and answers that we're trying to get to. We're collaborating with the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets, who's provided some funding to do some of the testing for rodenticide exposure. Let's see here. So to do this fast, the main things that I wanted to show the committee is the high exposure rates of SJARs. So for FJARs being the first generation anticoagulant rodenticides, SJARs secondary. And so what you could see here is that Fisher has the highest exposure, followed by bobcat. And in the slash line there, it's showing that there is a number of animals that we're testing that is testing positive for both FJARs and SJARs. We have the highest sample size for Fisher, and we've been sampling since 2018. We use trapper drive carcasses in order to get this information, and so that is their ultimate cause of death. So we wouldn't be able to tell whether or not that animal would have died from rodenticide exposure. We just know their history of exposure through their liver. So also keep in mind that there's some areas in Vermont that are sampled more often than others. And so those areas might be over representative of what our results are, whereas some areas that aren't sampled, it could be underrepresented. So just keep that in mind when you're looking at these results. The majority of samples that we have tested in Vermont have showed a positive detection for Fisher, whether that's trace amounts, which is below the detect well, it's the detection limit. It's not a number. It's just below that. So it's showing that it is at some point exposed. We just don't know the actual amount. So it's pretty low. So I included that in this dataset to just show that the amount of fissure that we have that we've sampled has varied with everything from trace amounts to pretty high amounts. And then in the slashed areas, it's showing that there's a mix of positive and negative detection. So in other words, in some years, they were positive, in some years, they were negative. And then for some reason, there was one town there that has no positive detections, and that is the town of Warren, which is random. Yeah. What that means, I don't know. So just to show the amount of second generation positive samples that are coming back for Fisher has been pretty steady and reliable at being fairly high of an exposure rate, whereas first generation seems to be declining over time. Still a small sample set. There's not any definite that we could take from this, but we can say that perhaps Fdars are being used less, and so maybe that's why we're seeing it less. And it could also mean that second generations are staying in their bodies longer. So we're detecting it over time, more and more. Difasinone was the most common first generation anticoagulant rodenticide and I call it Brody for short. It's the most common S jar. And so that's very similar to what's found in birds. It's very similar to what's found in fisher and literature and other carnivorous mammals. The average concentration for the FJARS, even though it's declining overall, the exposure rate is declining in fissure, the concentration seems to be increasing on average. Same thing with the secondary anticoagulant rodenticides. And how this compares to literature is that it just fits right in. It's more that we can contribute to literature and our knowledge of this issue. The main thing about Brody, about this compound, is that it has a higher liver retention rate. And so, what that means is that it could, With birds, what you just heard from Doctor. Renfrew is that it might take less for them, for birds, to be impacted, more so than mammals. But it's highly variable, depending the condition of the animal, the age, the sex. During this time of year, they might be a little bit more stressed out because they're getting ready to breed. Yeah, time of year. So all of these things play a role. It's not a simple issue. It's very difficult to study. And I just wanted to point out that the liver retention rates with this particular compound, it affects detection more than the time, or sorry, than potency, because it has such a long duration at which it stays in the liver. So we could test Fisher ten years from now. And even if this compound was not on the shelf, say it was banned, just as an example, we would still find this compound probably in Fisher livers, because it biochemulates in the body the most. Trace amounts, just here, wanted to show that the last test that we have was from the 2023 tracking season, and we had the majority of the samples really showing up as trace amounts, which at first I was like, Woo, that's great. But then I was like, Wait a second. Nope, that's not right, because it means that there's more exposure on the landscape. And we have maps of We can pinpoint down to the town level of where animals are getting exposed. So here, I'm showing fisher and bobcat. And even though the sample sizes are a little bit different, I think that the regulated trapping seasons, they provide those carcasses for us to test the liver to cast a wide net on where we can find rodenticides. It's very difficult to study. It's difficult to figure out if there's lethal effects. You could test the blood, but it's not gonna give you the complete picture. You could do fecal studies, but again, it's not gonna give you the complete picture, especially when we look at that one compound, Brody, where it stays in the body for the longest. So really, liver samples are best samples that you can get. And then finally, otter. Unfortunately, we found that otter have trace amounts in the Southeastern portion of the state. What does that mean? We don't know yet, but it could have a lot of different directions of what that could mean. And it's something that we plan on looking into further. So that's pretty much And hopefully, it was that five minutes? I'm not sure, but that was

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Pretty close.

[Speaker 0]: While we're all thinking about Brody, and maybe this is a question for your colleagues, What's the trade name, does it make sense that that's the one that seems to keep showing up in toxicology Berkeley?

[Unidentified Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets representative]: Yeah, the C1L, Asian American food market. So the product that's actually reported to be used amongst different products from a Dialogue, BurttiFacomb is reported to be used and it has a bunch of different brand names. We have a lot

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: of registrations for that product,

[Unidentified Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets representative]: but in terms of the use that's reported to us by the pest control companies, it's for

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: a child and that's used for us to treat.

[Unidentified Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets representative]: Now we can get you that information. Actually I provided that to you at

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: my testimony the other day, it's in the slides in there, but yeah. So it's

[Speaker 0]: a little confusing because they both start with the same. Yeah. But is it the same second generation that you were referring to? They're

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: both second generation.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: They're both second generation. Actually the

[Speaker 0]: I'm sorry, they were both second generation, but are you talking, in your presentation, were you referring to the same second generation? Yes. Yeah, okay. Okay, thank you. Can we give you just a couple of questions? Sure. A couple more questions. Representative Nelson?

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Fisher and bobcat populations, robust?

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: They are normal. We're not seeing any sort of declines, and we have a variety of different types of information. And

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: no data since we started baking second gen restricted use?

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Well, even if we had made that restricted use in what was it 2024, there are compounds again that stay in the liver for a long So it would take us at least like ten years to start noticing a difference.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And we haven't looked at

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: the non ARs, Cholomew, Calcirpol or the vitamin D1.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Yeah, Calcirpol and Romboneph

[John O’Brien (Director, Wildlife Division, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: is the most widely used

[Speaker 0]: non anti phlegm.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Bromomethyl, but I don't know if that's included in your screen.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: It is, so bromoh no, bromone. Yes, that's the neurological. Right. No, we haven't looked into that. So I don't think it's part of the screenings.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Okay, thank you. Representative Lipsky. Thank you. In a much earlier slide, you know, Warren stood out. But the Memorial County was dense and maybe even was a dark maroon earlier. You next one down. Next one.

[Speaker 0]: Slide 14 maybe.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: Well, that has the marine ones on it,

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I think he wants to

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: take Keep going, please. Oh, the other way. Go back up. There. More. This

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: one? One more. Okay. There you go.

[Sophie Sedatney (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That one. Yeah. Maybe

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: it's brown or black, but it looks sort of like a aubergine.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: The '70 the 7010. That's what they had built.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Which one's stoked? Yeah. Well, the I'm just curious what was the habitat work? If it is snow, which is I'm trying to envision.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Crassberry area. That could have been Crassberry. Mhmm. Yeah. So that's where we were having a lot of samples randomly tested.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: The Crassberry is Caledonia County or Orleans. Orleans. Crashberry's up a couple. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: So that's just the intensity of the sample. Yeah.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: Sample distribution.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: That is from Massey Trapinshilda.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: So and this isn't showing that the other the other maps are showing where they're being exposed the most. This is just the sampling distribution, so where our samples are coming from and how many there are.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: The frames and the red.

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: The voice. So the darker the white count. Yeah. So the darker the color means that there's more samples coming out of those counts. And then the white is that we have no samples from those counts.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Thank you. Mhmm.

[Rep. John O'Brien (Member)]: Right. Well, let's take one more question real quickly. Are parallel studies being done at fish and wildlife for non furbearer predators like foxes, coyotes, raccoons, which may be a roadkill you can test withers?

[Brianne Furfee (Furbearer Project Leader, VT Fish & Wildlife Department)]: That's a good question. So as I previously stated, it's really difficult. We haven't actually tested liver from any other species, but if there is roadkill, we have been collecting that, just in case there is some sort of correlation between roadkill and rodenticide exposure. We are working with other states and looking into the Northeast health of not only Fisher, but also Grey Fox. So we're collecting liver of Grey Fox as well. But then in terms of Red Fox and Coyote, we have collected those samples. Given the otter exposure, the question is whether or not our semi aquatic species, are they getting exposed? How are they getting exposed? Invertebrates, how are they getting exposed? So that might be the next branch of species that we need to start looking at.

[Speaker 0]: I thank you both, and I think we should probably wrap up for now. We'll be able to reschedule you folks for the afternoon okay. And if Fish and Wildlife would like to come back again then too. I know maybe you had a conflict, I didn't research, but otherwise, we'd happy to have you. So I want to just check and see whether we have Josh Kelly in the room. Hi, Josh. And I apologize, could we take five minutes before we Okay, you have a little time. Right, committee, let's take a five minute break.