Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Robin Scheu, Chair]: Good afternoon, this is the House Appropriations Committee. It is Tuesday, I think, February 3. We are here this afternoon to hear right now the budget presentations from the Attorney General and Fort Conversion Offices. And so with that, appropriate persons, please come forward. Good afternoon.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Good afternoon. Good see everybody on this beautiful Vermont wintry day. We have sent you materials, and now what I'd like to do is walk through those with you, the slides, and obviously question away if you have questions. We don't want to waste anyone's time. So I will kind of breeze through them, and I won't belabor points until we get to our brag slide, which I find irresistible lingering over. So you'll have to indulge me a little. Forgive me. That's what we want to hear. We want to hear about the good things that have happened in the past. It's been eleven year, eleven plus in my twelfth year working at the attorney general's office, and I'm very proud to lead the office. It's wonderful. Tons of wonderful people, so it's hard for me not to brag. So the first slide Yes? Just for the record, am Charity Clark, Attorney General. I have with me two very important people from my office. Marcy Hodgson is our very longtime CFO, our fiscal director. And we also have the wonderful Willa Farrell, who has also been in our office for a long time. And Willa is the director of the Community Justice Unit, and she oversees the core diversion program, which will be a feature of our presentation today. Great, thanks. Our first slide has a pie chart. Who doesn't love a pie chart? This is an overview of what the office does. So I'm just going to touch on this. We have our mission, which is to use our authority and expertise as the state of Vermont's independent law office to represent state governments, protect the public interests and the environment, and enforce the law with equal right and justice to all. The pie chart is the governor's recommended budget and shows all of the pockets of money. To zoom ahead to the punch line of our presentation, we are asking the committee to support the governor's recommended budget, along with a position that was created by the legislature in 2022, but I'll go into one position that is doing incredible work for Vermont. So we'll talk about that position. But in the meantime, let's just tick through these. As you can see, our funding comes from a variety of sources. We have interdepartmental transfer fees, basically our clients who pay us for our services in our civil divisions and our general counsel administrative law divisions. The general fund makes up the bulk of the money. We have the special fund, which basically is consumer settlements, largely consumer unit settlements. The tobacco fund, this is our diligent enforcement work in making sure that our work enforcing a law related to our settlement from 1998, when I was a newly college graduate. It's been around a long time, but there it is. And then finally, we have federal revenue funds. Primarily, what we're talking about here is the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which is a law enforcement agency in our office that protects vulnerable children from sexual exploitation, and the Medicaid Fraud and Residential Abuse Unit, call MFRAW. Critically, to have Medicaid come to your state, you need to have an MFRAW. So every state has one of those. Ours is a little bit unique because currently it's self funded. But every state has to have one. So that is an essential office, and that is the final piece of our pie. To provide just an overview of the office itself, we manage 147 positions statewide. The reason why it says that we manage them and not just have them is because many of the positions are actually embedded in agencies and departments and are not even on attorney general office position numbers. They're a position number to that agency. But we supervise them. So it's a unique situation. Most They're off the payroll of the other That's right. Most of our staff are exempt employees because most of our staff are lawyers. We have many, many lawyers. We are the largest law office in the state of Vermont. The largest law firm, because we're not a law firm, but we are the largest law office in the state of Vermont. And most of our budget, you will see, comes from personnel, not surprisingly, given what we do. We are people using our brains, and that's what costs us money. I have one question. Yes?

[David Yacovone, Member]: So the attorneys and embedded attorneys tell you to have them. So how does your let's say you manage them. How do you manage them?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: So we will work with the client on the hiring, and then we supervise them and provide feedback to them. They're a part of our team in terms of their reviews. Lawyers are supervising lawyers. In other words, it's not a commissioner or a deputy commissioner supervising that person. It's a lawyer supervising them.

[David Yacovone, Member]: I had to do the evaluations.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yeah. Well, it's a lot of collaboration. And honestly, I feel that when I look at, frankly, the dysfunction that happens in Washington and Congress, and I come to this building and I see the collaboration and I see the way that our office works with the governor's office and with the administration on these positions and many, many other topics, I feel like I wish everyone in the country could see what a functioning government looks like, because I feel like, in large part, we have that here, and it's a lot to be proud of. But we get to live it every day because we have this strange and complicated structure that somehow works for us. But it is what it is. We have two separate appropriations. The first is for most of the attorney general's office. We have six divisions. The administration is the business office, IT, things like that. Environmental and public protection includes consumer, includes civil rights, and it includes the all important consumer assistance program, where I'm sure your constituents are familiar with the consumer assistance program. That is how most Vermatras interface with our office. The criminal division includes ICAC, I mentioned, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, as well as the Medicaid Fraud Unit and the traditional criminal unit prosecuting crimes. The General Counsel and Administrative Law Division is a grab bag of a lot of general counseling type work, as well as administrative law could be us representing a party before an administrative hearing. So it is a litigation kind of environment. Human services is, I think, that's our largest division. We provide lawyers throughout the agency of human services, whether it be ETCS, mental health, etcetera. We have lawyers there. Many are in Waterbury. And then finally, the Civil Division is a civil defense division defending cases that have been brought against the state. So we are both prosecutors in some sense against corporations, against individuals who are committing crimes. We also defend the state when the state is sued and individuals working for the state when they are student in their official capacity. So that's the overview of the main attorney general's office. Part of our office is WILLA's unit, which is sorry, the Community Justice Unit. The Community Justice Unit is kind of the umbrella. It provides grants and overseas grants to a lot of local agencies that are restorative justice agencies or community justice agencies that you have in your communities. And it is a large program, a large, incredibly important program. I'm trying not to go on and on because I'm very proud of the work that everyone does and that too. But, for example, 20% of misdemeanors in this state are referred to court diversion. So it is a pretty significant program. And brilliantly, it is very local. So every community can adapt and respond to the needs of their own community and knows the stakeholders and the players and the cultural dynamics of their own community. We are the kind of umbrella, well, it's not that we supervise them. We provide the grants. We work as a hub with all of the grant recipients. And it's a really wonderful program. And I know that they always make appearances in the state house one breakfast. I think we already did ours this coming up. It's coming up twentieth. February 20. So if you want to meet some incredibly cool, hardworking people who know a ton about their communities, I recommend swinging by that morning. Okay, our next slide is a nice overview of the Office of the Attorney General budget. That's what I'm going go through next. So first, let's talk about just the basic expenses. So as you can see, the personal services is the overwhelming bulk of our expenses. And there was an increase in change. The increase largely out of our control. You can see that on the right, the green box that lists out the Pay Act, the retirement and the health insurance. The operating expenses are the next largest bucket. We had an increase in some of the internal service funds. So this is things like the Agency of Digital Services had an increase, again, not totally in our control. And then a grant to prevent child abuse, Vermont, is the $20,000 And that's what that means. In terms of the funding source, of course, you saw the pie chart on the previous page. This lays out the actual dollars, the general fund, the special fund I mentioned, the consumer recoveries, the tobacco fund, of course, from the 1998 settlement. The federal revenue fund is the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and M FRAW. And the interdepartmental transfer are our clients paying for things, paying for our services. So that is the rough overview. And you can see the increases. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about those increases, but I think our sidebars are helpful. Down below, we tease out in the bottom green long box. We tease out a little bit more about what I just described with the increases. The special fund notes the one time increased spending authority the border fees and reimbursements. Again, that was ok'd by the governor's office. So we're on track with the governor's recommend there. And then we have some adjustments to the other areas, mostly related to increased salaries and benefits. So the next slide is our brag slide. We're so bragging, we get two slides, I think, on this. Let me just describe a little bit what's been going on in the office. So over the past year, I have spent a lot of time and my Some members of my office have spent a lot of time working on a project I like to call the Trump administration, something that in my first term I didn't spend any time doing, or very little time. We did have to sue the Biden administration on abortion issue. But I've spent a lot of time on this, unfortunately. There has been 41 lawsuits filed since 01/20/2025. We have a very strong win rate of around 90% of the cases for preliminary injunction motions. So we've got an early win in the case. The rulings have mostly centered on a violation of the Constitution of The United States by addition of the Administrative Procedures Act, which basically tells the president's administration how to conduct business, what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to do it. So these violations caused us to sue, along with other attorneys general in other states. And we have a very strong win rate. So in addition to restoring rights that we have, we've also been able to restore tens of millions of dollars back to the state of Vermont that the federal government had wrongfully withheld or legally withheld that had been appropriated by Congress. So we're really proud of that work, that we kept that money flowing. And we also have filed a number, many, many amicus briefs, friend of the court briefs, along with, again, along with other states. So we have a very strong team collaborating on this work, which is wonderful. For a small state like Vermont, it would be very onerous to do this all by ourselves. But we have a great coalition of AG's offices working together on this, and it's been really powerful and important that we are involved in standing up for the country and for democracy and for the dollars relevant to your work, for the dollars that are supposed to be coming to Vermont, not just the state of Vermont proper, but Vermont. Some of these go to nonprofits and individuals, and it's important that that money kept flowing. And we'll continue to stand up for the Constitution as we continue to see violations at the federal level. In addition to this defensive posture, as I like to think of it, we also have our ongoing enforcement cases where we are the plaintiff, the state is the plaintiff. These include, and this is just like a grab bag of some hot ones. The first is the Exxon and fossil fuel companies. We sued on a greenwashing theory that they were lying to consumers about how green their fossil fuel products were. That case is ongoing. Long time ago, we sued PFAS manufacturers, and that is going to go to trial hopefully within the next year. We have many, many lawsuits against opioid marketers, distributors, manufacturers, a real variety of people, as you know about. I'm sure you recall the proceeds from those settlements are the mechanism in place to recommend to you how to spend the money. That's not for us to do, it's for a committee making that recommendation. We continue to work on some of those cases, although a lot of them have already been settled. We sued Meta over Instagram, harms to children, and TikTok for the same reason. I will say, when I ran for reelection in 2024 and I was going around Vermont and talking to people, that was by far the most common issue that people wanted to talk about, especially parents, teachers and even kids wanted to talk about those cases. So it was very rewarding to see the concern reflecting back to me. Those cases continue. Most of these cases, of course, we do the same thing. People want to the defendant wants to file a motion to dismiss to get rid of the case. And so they want to duke that out early. So it delays what feels like the start of the case. So we haven't gotten very far in that case, but we have continued to win on those early motions. And so have other states who've sued, because this was a collaborative effort, especially Meta. I think it was almost every state in the country sued. So those cases continue. We also sued Monsanto, who made PCBs and contaminated Vermont's waterways and schools. And that case also continues. We sued pharmacy benefit managers for saying that they were reducing the cost of pharmaceuticals, and in fact, they were driving the cost of pharmaceuticals to go up. CVS and Express Scripts are the most common PBMs by far. They make up the overwhelming majority of the market here in Vermont. And then we have ongoing work to hold illegal vaping manufacturers and sellers and other online tobacco products accountable. Selling tobacco products, including vaping, online is, of course, illegal in Vermont. So we have ongoing work that we do there to hold those folks accountable to protect Vermont's youth and all of us from the problems of smoking and vaping. Next slide. In addition to defending democracy, we also defend Vermont. When the legislature passes laws, sometimes there is a lawsuit that follows. This would include the large capacity magazine ban, as well as the waiting period that was installed. We're currently defending a case related to the Climate Superfund Act that was recently announced. And we also have had to defend the private school tuition funding statute. And more recently, the secretary of state was sued due to her refusal provide data to the federal government who requested it unlawfully. So we passed a new strategic plan last year, and we've started to collect the data, which is so gratifying. So we wanted to just give you kind of a grab bag of the data so you can see what we're up to. And that's what these next points are. We review grants and contracts through GCAL, the General Counsel and Administrative Law Division. That's part of what we do. We've reviewed and analyzed and provided client advice on over 1,000 of those grants. In 2025, we completed three thirty five investigations at ICAC, along with 115 search warrants, which, when you consider, I think we have like four people doing this and two dogs who do search warrants, our amazing two dogs, Kaya and Mojo. Our consumer assistance program handled over 8,000 constituent contacts in a year. Like I said, I'm sure some of your constituents call the consumer assistance program due to help they needed with scams, identity theft or a consumer problem. We had eight fifteen inquiries from the public received and addressed by our civil rights unit. Our civil rights unit, although it has a bigger title, is mostly focused on employment discrimination. And they're, again, they do a lot of the little. They're not a huge agency. And especially given the shift in attitude at the federal level, that has become a little more fraught than it was in the past. And they do incredibly important work. And then, as an example, we got a twenty seven years to life sentence for an aggravated sexual assault of a child case after a three day trial. So just Yes, I'll ask a question.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: Sorry. Can you describe the difference between, because it's come up at different times, the difference between, say, the employment discrimination complaints that you handle versus those that the Human Rights Commission?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yeah, I mean, this is laid out in statute. So the Human Services Commission handles complaints that are related to the state. I'm getting nods from the gallery here. We don't do those. We do private employers. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to clarify it because it gets a little mushed up. It does. And we work with them. It's like another one of those areas where our good relationships and communicating with each other is really important. So we try to keep that up. Yeah. I have a question regarding your 1,300 grants and contracts. Yeah. Those grants across all agencies or just your agency? All the client agencies we serve. So that could be the agency of transportation. It could be an AHS. We have someone at education, at tax. We have people all over. And why were you reviewing them? So I always use this as an example, because I feel like it's very relatable. But if we're paving a section of a road and we needed to contract with a paving company to help us do that, lawyers in my office might review the contract to make sure that everything looked good and right and we were gonna get the benefit of our bargain that we were paying for. And we have a strict procedure that is followed when it comes to contracts, because we have, like, the best practices we want everyone to follow. And some of our lawyers are experts in what that procedure is. And so when we, when the state is signing a contract, it's like as we want to make sure it's the best contract that we have and that we're wisely using the taxpayers' dollars and the time frame is correct and everything. So we perform lawyering work when it comes to contracts. With grants, it could be federal grants coming to the state, and we want to make sure that we're crossing the t's, dotting the i's, and doing all the things that need to take place. And a lawyer is looking at this and making sure that it's right and accurate. Are they not reviewing that first in the agency? They probably are. Lawyers are trained to The other thing about some of it, I'm just going to say, some of these contracts are extremely boring. Lawyers, I sometimes am surprised. We have an appetite for boring that is and it's very it's like a superpower. It's like, oh, you don't scare me with your 90 page contract. My attention will be held. That's right. So

[David Yacovone, Member]: my embedded attorney, we paid for it, but I supervised. He's reviewing these contracts. Are you talking to something above and beyond that, are you including him as one

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: yours? Yeah, he'd be included. Yep. So is this an annual review you do? Or was this Oh, it's just they come in. It's like the bread and butter of the work that we do. These things come in, and that's part of the service we provide. We have such a wide variety of skill sets in our office. It's kind of amazing. When our interns come in, I'm thinking, you literally could anything you would want to do in government, we do it. We have an expert in that. You want to go to court? We've got that. You like criminal? You like civil? Whatever it is. You like administrative law? Whatever it is, we've got that. You could learn from someone in our office.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: It's kind of pretty full. The contract piece to part of the agency of administration bulletin 3.5 requires AGO review and approval under certain thresholds.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: I think the next slide is the request for the addition I mentioned, the thing that we would like over oh, yeah, it's up on the screen Over the governor's recommend. So this is our home improvement specialist position. This was created by the legislature in 2022 when you passed the home improvement, the new home improvement law that required registry with the Secretary of State's office. And part of that created this position. The position is located at our consumer assistance program. The person who has filled the position since its inception has experience both as a home contractor and as a paralegal. So he's extremely effective. I have to say, I was involved with the passage of that bill that included this position, and our results have far outpaced what I was expecting. He has been incredibly effective. The resolutions that he has mediated between parties have resulted in over $100,000,000 coming back to Vermonters. That is both Mostly, I think it's homeowners. It's also contractors who aren't getting paid. So it really kind of goes both ways. He's just extremely effective. We've had 194 home improvement complaints. The amount of recovery is very large. And we hear, in the criminal context, we hear a lot of challenges relating to addressing home improvement fraud. And part of the reason is we have to do a lot with a little. And in the criminal justice system, many prosecutors necessarily are busy prosecuting very serious crimes that don't involve property, but involve safety and violence. And so sometimes the home improvement area doesn't get the same attention that some of the victims would like. This is a way to, in a very cost effective way, address those concerns, mediate the problems. And sometimes it's just not going to work. But as we can see, for many, many Vermonters, it worked to the tune of $1,220,000 So it can be really, really effective. And this is the only ask that we are requesting about the governor's recommend, is to convert the home improvement specialist position to a permanent position and provide the base funding for the position. So this would go into your base then?

[David Yacovone, Member]: And

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: then, just to address another position that was necessarily created by the legislature, I think that was in 2023, recall that you passed a restorative justice bill that was excellent, and it moved pre charge from the Department of Corrections to our community justice unit, which it makes a lot more sense for it to be there. It also enabled geographic justice, I would say. It was not a program available in every county. Having it come to us enabled that to happen, your law that you wrote enabled that to happen. To stand up the program and administer the program, because of a number of reasons, the Department of Corrections could not basically send their money of their position to our office. They had that person doing multiple things. And the program is now larger than it was there under your bill. And so you have created an assistant director for Diversion, who is doing a wonderful job. We have the money in the budget. We have the money in our system. We don't have the position converted yet, and we would like the position to be converted. It's just not a financial ask right now. So including that on our list, just so that it's not forgotten about. So the position is there. Yes. You have the money. Change it from limited service to permanent. That's right. Exactly. And the first item is you would like another $85,000 in order to make this improvement specialist permanent. Yes, exactly. And both of these decisions were created by the legislature, but only as limited service, in the end, as limited service, and we'd like to make them permanent. Both are, well, like I said, the home improvement specialist is working beautifully, and the assistant director for diversion is necessary to execute the program that the legislature created. We have a question.

[David Yacovone, Member]: Those are not included in the spreadsheet.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: What was the spreadsheet? Is that the Governor's recommend? I don't know where you are,

[Marcy Hodgson, Chief Financial Officer (Office of the Attorney General)]: but are you referring to the one hundred and

[David Yacovone, Member]: forty seventh position? That's just the Governor's recommend.

[Marcy Hodgson, Chief Financial Officer (Office of the Attorney General)]: One of them, the assistant director is in that 147, because that's part of our base funding. The home improvement specialist is not included in the 147 because that's a one time appropriation, not included in our base.

[David Yacovone, Member]: I can see the 147 spreadsheets.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Oh, it's all I think she's referring to your summer day treat. Yes, the first slide. With the pie chart we like so much. All right.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: Let's move on. Lost my place.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Okay, so we thought that this would be helpful to break down each data we have by county, so folks could find their own county and see what's going on there. You can see the count of individual cases we worked on and then the amount that was recovered over the past three years since the Although the I think the physician came in partway through 2023 late in the year, actually. I want to say October. I can't remember. But anyway, so this is the amount saved or recovered by whoever complained, whether it was the contractor or the homeowner. I thought that would be useful for you.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: $41,220,000 Yes.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yep. The next slide is basically the summary of our base reductions and funding increases. So you can dig into it a little bit longer, a little bit deeper. The base reduction, we begin with the discontinued utilization of a case mapping software. This is a tool that lawyers use to build their case. It was called CaseMap. It really wasn't being used by many, and we decided that it wasn't worth the expense. So we saved money there. We also reduced travel and communication costs by $6,500 So there's our base reductions. The base funding increases, we have the general fund increase, which I went over very early on on page two. The consumer settlement fund spending authority increase. This is accounted for some billing of base full that we have. And I think this includes the federal funding, the FTAP. We had a federal grant that was discontinued, and it was paying for one of our lawyers. So that was part of that. And then the interdepartmental transfer increase is basically increase in salary and benefit due to the Pay Act. And those are our base reductions and base funding increases. The next slide has the major areas of increased expenditure. Again, I feel like I'm repeating the same thing, but maybe that's good. We really learned it. We had our benefit rate increase and the annualization of the pay act, of course, our annual case management agreement, and the ADS Internal Services Fund. The annual case management agreement, I just want to address that for a minute. So all lawyers have a case management software. When I arrived at the attorney general's office in 2014, we had an outdated system called Law Manager. It is 2026. We still have that system. It's been many, many, many, many years since the provider of that system has anyone skilled to update it. When something goes wrong, we basically have to just hack our way through. So it's been years. The legislature has already invested in making sure that we have a system that is appropriate, and we've been working on that. And that's That money is This money is part of that. So it's necessary and important. The major areas of decreased expenditure, we have vacancy savings from increased payroll costs. There's no rate change at 7%. And then, as I mentioned, we discontinued that case mapping software called CaseMap that we weren't really using as much as could justify the expense. Can you verify the difference between the case mapping software and the case management software? Yes. Case mapping is kind of like a tool to plan your case. Here's my evidence, get it organized. It makes your time more efficient and stuff that helps you do that. The case management is much, much, much bigger. That's where every single case we have is in that. We actually use our current system for the consumer assistance program. So all the data that you've seen me reciting, like, this is how much we save, this is how many people, that's all from Law Manager. Yes, so it's all in there. We use it even with some constituent work that we do. But all the cases are in there, which is really important so that we can find information that's needed and keep track of things that increases efficiencies for the work that the lawyers are doing and others in our office. It is also used by the upward divergent program as well. So it's really important. Yeah. I'm going to turn it over to Marci for this next slide. These next two are

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: our ups just and downs from 26 to 27. Everything in brown is the Pay Act benefits, Apparel Service Fund.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: That's pretty routine. We're aware of all of these companies.

[Marcy Hodgson, Chief Financial Officer (Office of the Attorney General)]: The only thing I'll call your attention to is the 270,000 that's down in the line that says 506,200 other personal services. That's the 270,000 that you folks increased the governor's recommended last year for our AAG and the deputy support diversion or assistant support diversion director. Those two positions cost $270,000 you all added that in because of the way systems work finance and management put it in under that code and just to make sure that everything reconciled I had to take it out of that code and it's ups in the personal services and stuff.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Those salaries are up above, sounds like?

[Marcy Hodgson, Chief Financial Officer (Office of the Attorney General)]: Yeah, up. On salaries and benefits. The next page is the same thing, ups and downs. All internal service fund costs. We got hit pretty hard this year with ADS, but I think that was across the state.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: She's just reviewing it, it's all standard stuff. Any questions on these slides? We learned about their successes. Had two pages worth of brights.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: You've been doing a lot of busy good work this year.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: You very much. I was getting a sandwich at the co op at lunch today, and a man came up to me and said, are you Charity Clark? I want just to say thank you for your work. And it happens to me pretty much every day. Yeah, people-

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: It's nothing like knowing you're doing important work. Yes. And

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: next, there is something, and it's telling all the people who are actually doing the lawyering that they're doing a great job. And came up to me while I was buying lip balm and wanted to say thank you, which is what happened. There is a request on page six, four, seven, new $85,000 and then a conversion of a fixed cost with no money. This, I of course keep mentioning the consumer assistance program and just to emphasize, I truly think this is the most common way Vermonters interface with our office is through CAP. Here are some of the top complaints that we received so that you can just see an overview. And I want to make a distinction between something as an FYI. We deal with scams and we deal with complaints. Complaints are legitimate businesses, basically scams are criminals. So a complaint could be against Macy's. I bought this blender and now it doesn't work and it was supposed to work and it doesn't. That could be a consumer complaint, a scam. It's like someone's literally trying to trick you and steal your money. So these are the complaints. Cars are always the number one. They've always been the number one. They always will be because cars are the most expensive thing we buy besides our homes. And no surprise, home improvement is number two. You can see why we're so excited that our home improvement specialist is so effective because look how many complaints we get about home improvement. Retail, this is sort of a grab bag of like the blender example I just gave you. Fuel, critically, the legislature helped with this many years ago, maybe fifteen years ago. Propane in Vermont, there's a lot of rules and protections for consumers when it comes to propane, because so many Vermonters who use propane are living in rural areas. They're not on Vermont Gas. They don't have maybe a lot of money to be living in an urban area or what have you. And so there's laws that are very protective. When we get a propane complaint, someone literally stops everything they're doing to try to address the problem immediately and make sure that that person has heat. Incredibly, it's not a matter of our laws. You did such a great job. Our laws and our propane rule protect that person, and they will get heat. It's just a matter of us navigating, calling the people we know and say, You can't do this, you can't do this, here's the law, here's the rule of getting that person back online for propane. So that fuel is a big thing, and we're really proud of that work. Entertainment could be like ticket sales. I don't need to go through all of these, but it is an interesting point. As you can see, we get a lot of complaints, and our recoveries and savings to consumers is on the uptick. We have And a lot of that, to be honest with you, is the difference between having a home improvement specialist and not having home improvement specialist. So the bar chart at the top.

[Michael Nigro, Member]: Entertainment tickets? Yeah. There seems to be an increasing amount of scams for concert sales.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yeah.

[Michael Nigro, Member]: Have you seen that, and is that something, I mean, you're talking real money too, these tickets. Are you seeing more of that, is that something your office deals with?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yeah, we do deal with that. I don't know that we're seeing more of it. I'm not sure about that, because I don't have that data in front of me, but it's definitely here, and it really depends on the era, to use an entertainment ticket sales related pun. I'm hearing giggling from my group here.

[Michael Nigro, Member]: For the Swifties.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: For the Swifties. And also, sometimes I remember a few years ago, was a concert here in Vermont that was a lot of scandal around ticket sales. So it just sort of depends. I would say that in general, scams are increasing because technology has made it very easy for scammers to scam us. They're almost always overseas. They're certainly outside of Vermont, almost always. And so people, I was just at a town hall last night and someone asked me a scam related question because I'm always talking about scams. And one of the reasons why I'm always talking about scams is because that's the way you help protect people from scams is to make them aware of scams. So yeah, we do talk a lot about scams for sure.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: Yeah, have a question too. Back to the home improvement for a moment. A few years ago, we required there to be a registry.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yes, that's So has that been helpful?

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: Are you finding that where there are these home improvement issues, they're not registered? Or what are you seeing? How do they tie together?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: I would say, and if you would ask me when we were advocating to get that bill passed, I wouldn't have said this because this position wasn't even in the original bill. But having this position has, to me, been the most effective thing because now, not just the homeowner, but also the contractor, when they need help, can contact our office and our office can effectively mediate a resolution. And it really helps. I think, I would say, generally speaking, I don't know if most, probably most of the contractors who are letting us down are just, they're unsophisticated at business. And they might be really good at building a deck, but they're unsophisticated at business, and they kind of might need this help of, we need to resolve this. Some of them are criminals, they are absolutely committing crimes, and it's not something that a home improvement specialist, the consumer assistance program, could effectively deal with. That's not the category. But for many, it really is. I think, and if you recall the journey that that bill had, it was vetoed by the governor. And when it came back, that's when this position was added. And so it wasn't even a part of the, even original buildup as passed. It wasn't conceived. It was something that he thought about it, what could be helpful to kind of mitigate the changes that the governor needed, which was, I remember correctly, a much higher threshold of the amount of money the contract was worth that triggered the necessity to register. And as a part of that, I was like, well, what else can we do to help this problem? This position was created. And it's just been really effective.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: So are most of the people, when you're dealing with these issues, do you

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: check to see if they're on the registry? Yes.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: And are most of them actually registered? There's

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: two registries. There's the initial criminal registry, which is anyone who's been convicted of the crime of home improvement fraud. And then there's the Secretary of State's registry. That's the one I'm talking about. So the thing about the registry is not everybody is required to register because they might not have a contract that hits the I think it's 10,000 although not positive. Right. So yeah, we can look and see and help them with that. But ultimately, not everybody who's gonna find themselves.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: Right, so I just let you know you're actually checking it out because if they should be registered and you can tell that they need

[David Yacovone, Member]: to be

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: registered. I don't tell people, who don't, cares, register, because you're showing your potential customers that you take it seriously and get a contract. That's the other important thing, is you have to have a contract and insurance if you are hitting that threshold. It's to really help a small business be more sophisticated and use best practices. That's, think, I the design of the bill initially. And then having Gabriel, as our home improvement specialist, having him be expert in this and kind of guiding and mediating and advising in some capacity both the contractor and the home owner has been really helpful. Yeah. Thanks, Dave.

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: I just wanna make sure I'm tracking okay here. On page six, which shows the home improvement resolve.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yep. And I

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: look at twenty twenty four, it says 67. Then when I go to page 13 and look at the total number of complaints filed, I think it's saying two thirty complaints for home improvement, if I'm on the right page.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yep.

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: So does that mean there were two thirty five, we resolved 67? Did we not get to those up to two thirty because we just didn't have the resources?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: So a popular reason why is the person who's being complained about, we're gonna assume it was probably the contractor, refused to engage with our office. They never got back to us. They didn't care. We never heard from them again. So it's difficult for us to Face the ghost. Yeah, for the home improvement specialist to work his magic if the business won't And that happens, that's not just for home improvement. That's for all matters at the consumer assistance program. If the business is not engaging, we can't really perform mediation.

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: If we had another helper, another position here, are you confident that there's still enough people who would engage, that it will make it worthwhile?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: I would say generally at the consumer assistance program, more hands on deck is always helpful. I don't know if home improvement, if it would, I have other areas that I think would warrant attention in addition to home improvement. There's a lot of areas.

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: Actually, I thought it was exclusively home improvement you were requesting.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Well, we are. Oh, okay. But in terms of this, he's doing an excellent job with the tools that we have. I mean, he's doing an excellent job. There are other, I would say there's other needs and attention that could be paid. But right now, just having that position is really

[David Yacovone, Member]: Thank you.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: We're kind of running out of time here. Can we, let's figure out what you think would be most important. Sure. I just want to draw your attention to the common points of confusion. I don't need to read that, but I just think that it is kind of important. I want to zoom ahead to page 15 so that I can just highlight some of the recoveries. The attorney general's office does bring in money, especially through our consumer unit. The right column is the FY 'twenty six year to date. Just ticking through the top is Juul Labs, Juul being a vaping company that was settled regarding trying to get kids hooked on their product. Johnson and Johnson is a talc, settlement related to talc. Walgreens was a Weights and Measures from our wonderful agency of agriculture. Angie was consumer fraud related to certifying professions that don't need to be certified. The airlines reporting corp, they were not registered as a data broker. That's a law that you guys passed in 2018. Baxter Healthcare, you have a prescribed products gift ban that was put in place many years ago. One Road Paving is just a paving company related to a consumer issue. So that's where we got our $2,600,000 that we collected in 2026 year to date. So I wanted to flag that for you. And next page is tobacco. Just a friendly reminder, we bring in roughly 23,000,025 million dollars every year through a tobacco settlement. Over time, since 1998, this is now like $850,000,000 the attorney general's office has brought in. It's a ton of money, thanks to the work of former Attorney General Bill Sorrell, former Attorney General and Chief Justice Amistoy, and a long time ago, but we are still seeing recoveries every year. Did I skip over that? Oh, yeah, that's right. I skipped over the one time utilization for the consumer settlement. So there's a slide that has on top, you can see $1,500,000 for Medicaid fraud and then $461,000 for loss of federal. I want to just explain this for a moment. So our M FRAU unit had a pretty major settlement, and it was Our M FRAU unit is self funded, meaning we use our own recoveries to fund the unit. That's not the most common way that states do it, but it is the way we have done it. This year, we have a highlight of its imperfections because we don't have enough money to cover. We, under the governor's blessing, have requested this amount to be transferred to our, from our usual recoveries funds to MFRAW so that we can meet the match we require to meet under the MFRAW program with the federal government. And we will take the time this next year to sort of figure out funding M FRAW should look like going forward, and we will have that to you next year. And then the second is we have a couple of, I guess, surprises. We had to backfill lost federal funding, and we also had an increase in salaries and benefits. I surmise that some of this is due to the extremely excellent workers we've been able to hire as a result of cleaning the federal government. They are more experienced and our attorney pay plan here in, well, it's like it's everywhere in the state, as well as private practice, the more experience you have, the more money you make, which sounds fair. So we have had that increase. So this is something that is a part of the governor's recommend, but we wanted to highlight it for you because it is a one time utilization of that consumer fund. So, it's from a central So,

[David Yacovone, Member]: your venture is up about 10% this year?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: I think that's right. So,

[David Yacovone, Member]: what's the driver?

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: The driver, if you go to page two, I mean, is where I looked when I was trying to understand it. Page two has the nice summary, and it has the personal I like to look, well, down here explains it, too. But the personal services increase, so we have increase in pay act, increase retirement, increase health insurance. We have the increase for ADS. And then our case management system is an addition. So those are a lot of the increase. And then we just, I mean, generally, it's our budget's personnel. So you're going to see that our large part of our increases are related to personnel. It's the benefits, it's salaries.

[David Yacovone, Member]: I've seen a lot of other ones come in at 3% or so this year.

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: Oh, really? Yeah, we're pretty Operating costs, 13%.

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yep. What

[David Yacovone, Member]: the driver was for

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: Yeah, most of our expenses relate to personnel. So, not surprisingly, the increase is due to personnel and that's a cost in the benefits and the salaries. I mean, there's other things as well, but that's definitely part of it.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: And if you look at the next page, you can see that personnel is 9.7% increase. They were asked to budget 3% even if the union contract was higher, they were asked to budget 5% for health insurance, even though health insurance was going to be 15%. So it really wasn't realistic. But when

[David Yacovone, Member]: I look to the side in the green I see 7.7 for Pay Act, 7.47 for 5%, they're all less than 10% as a proportion of cases. Case

[Wayne Laroche, Member]: management system.

[David Yacovone, Member]: That would be an operating system.

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: So, a lot of the

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: money comes from the specialist. Yeah, that's a big part of it. Madam Chair, as I was noting, we have to have Medicaid fraud unit to have Medicaid in the state. So that is something that we need. Mindful of time, I just wanted to flag our environmental recoveries page, because you will see that it's a lot smaller dollars than the consumer. A lot of these are farms, and we're mindful of the financial realities of farms. They may have been breaking an environmental law that we are focused on getting the harm to stop and the fine that they experience is usually a lot less. And that's the way that it's always been. So just by explaining that for you, I mean, think it's probably obvious that a lot of these are farms, but just wanted to explain that to you. We talked already about M. Frau, so I wanna make sure we give Will a time to talk about court diversion. So I'm kind of reluctant to keep pointing this out. But critically, Medicaid fraud is really protecting the most vulnerable people in the state, and they do really important work. A lot of the work they do is criminally based. There's no receipts. They're not making money off of a corporate and fines off of a corporation. It's really pursuing criminal actions against individuals who are harming people who are vulnerable. So that's the dynamic of Medicaid fraud. And we have some information about their work on page 19 when it comes to the money And the complex litigation social fund was created a few years ago. This is something that we use when we have a complex litigation that we're defending large capacity magazine ban, we might need to hire experts, and that fund is used to do that. That's critical work when you're building a case. So that's a fund that we use for that purpose as an example. Well, yes, we would like to learn about court diversions. Yes, that's okay. Thanks, Willa. Thank you.

[Willa Farrell, Director, Community Justice Unit]: Good afternoon. My name is Charity Set, it's Willa Farrell, and I work closely with grantees around the state doing court diversion and pretrial services. And I'd just like to start by thanking you and the legislature for increasing the appropriation last year, which allowed us to continue funding that DOC had ended for pre charged diversion, which had been codified the previous year, as well as continuing to expand that set of services statewide. This has been a year of transition. We were not able to fund all counties, but we will be next year. We've worked this year on streamlining and looking for efficiencies so that next year there will be funding provided statewide for pre charged diversion along with the full complement of the rest of court diversion services, which includes what we call post charged diversion now, which is when prosecutor refers as opposed to a law enforcement officer, as well as the underage civil violation program for alcohol, possession, where the people regain their driver's license, and then also helping defendants when the judge orders our staff to work with those folks. We provide an annual report. I'm happy to send that to anybody that gives you the breakdown by county. I just want to highlight, as the attorney general noted, court diversion is really, we talk of it as an alternative, but it's really a key essential part of the criminal justice and youth justice system. Over 20% of misdemeanors are referred in family divisions. I think last year, something like 35%. So these are services that prosecutors rely heavily on and have really good relationships with. I wanted to note that we hired also, as you heard, an assistant court diversion director. Her name's Kelly Arons. She has worked in three different community justice centers in her career and comes to us from the Burlington CJC after ten years. She supervised a team of five, and she has really deep experience in the practice as well as as a systems thinker. She's really been a boom to our office. She finished last month visiting every site in the state and is bringing back her observations. And we're hearing strongly about the appreciation of precharge diversion as a really fast, speedy response, and also interest in how our office can support local programs in terms of consistency, high quality services, data collection. And we are working also with Prime Research Group around data, looking at the data we collect through Law Manager and how better to measure outcomes to ensure that we can provide that back to the programs for their own quality assurance work. So running through my, I guess the thing I would like to close with is there are about 80 people around the state who do work under these grants, not to mention hundreds of volunteers. And these are some of the more dedicated people in your communities. And I mean, they're dedicated people doing the hard work in many areas, but these restorative justice practitioners are passionate and committed. I know many of them work other jobs. These are not like high paid jobs. This is a very cost efficient set of services where people really are dedicated and go above and beyond in like, really holding people accountable for what they've done, figuring out how to repair harm, and providing incredible services to victims of crime, often for offenses, as the attorney general referenced earlier, that might not receive the full attention of a state's attorney's victim advocate who's dealing with a crime of violence. That they

[Charity Clark, Vermont Attorney General]: can be treated locally, yes, worked with locally. We are mindful of time.

[David Yacovone, Member]: I've been hearing good reports on what's going on there too. It sounds like you're tracking your criticism, you will be able to have a trend sooner, well, that's kind of sooner than the program, but eventually you'll be able to track trends in that.

[Willa Farrell, Director, Community Justice Unit]: Yes. We have somewhat outdated, I mean, it's not outdated, it's from 2019 data, but pre charged aversion will be a different indication. And after a few years, we would hope to be able to do a study to see how that early fast speed response plays out.

[Robin Scheu, Chair]: Thank you very much for coming in. Thank you. Trevor Squirrell, is that correct? So questions we have, we will pass through Trevor and he'll come back to you and we'll take care. Thank you very much for your Thank you. Thank all for your time. Thank Very appreciated. So

[Tiffany Bluemle, Ranking Member]: if you don't mind if we take a quick break before we get