Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Good morning. This is the House Appropriations Committee. It is Thursday, 02/12/2026. It's 9AM, and we are continuing our tour of the FY27 budget. And this morning, we have the Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs with us present their budget. Always happy to see you. Welcome. If you wanna tell us your name for the record, then take it away.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Thank you, madam chair. I'm the executive director of the Department of States Attorneys and Sheriffs, Tim Legers, Dumont.

[Annie Noonan (Fiscal/Finance Staff, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Annie Noonan with the Department of States Attorneys and Sheriffs doing fiscal work for the next few weeks. Wow. Are you really the top of week?

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I really am. Really, really this week? Really, really.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Saint Patrick's Saint Patrick's Day will be Oh, really? That's the celebration. And also with me here today is a few a few folks who are big parts of this department's fiscal operations and oversight. Barbara Bernadini, the longtime fiscal officer for the department, eighteen years with the department. And Sheriff Harlow, who's chair of the executive committee of our state's attorneys and sheriffs executive committee for sheriffs, and also Lauren Clemens, the director of operations and labor relations for the department. And it's really a joint effort. And one of the things that I think you all know is that we're kind of small but mighty in the grand scheme of what what you do in this room, about $35,000,000 budget, four different budgets. And then we have our central office plus the 28 field offices. So it's an interesting thing. 1983, this building decided that they didn't wanna hear from 28 county officers for money and other things. So they created our our department. And from that point forward, we've been trying to do our best to be an departmental pass through for county operations with a lot of different things that have been added on over the years. Now in your presentation, I am not gonna go over the whole thing, but we wanted to do was ensure you had what you needed for this session as things come up. The judicial data filing is a, nine hundred day project our department has taken on using data from the last three years and analyzing it over time. And so in, you know, seven years, we'll have ten years of judicial filing data. But we started this practice of analyzing judicial data to talk about what we do. And the reason that's good for you all is it's verified by the judiciary. It's not just my data. It's data that passed through to to the judiciary, and that makes me feel comfortable as well. In terms of our tour this morning, we're gonna start with just a brief summary of the department, and then we'll go through the four budgets. We'll do state's attorneys first because it's the most complex, and we'll do SIU because it's the least complex, and we'll do victim advocates, also very simple. And then we'll end with sheriffs, which is, as we know, the the 14 elected sheriffs plus basically the transport program who are state employees. Does that sound good to you, manager? So on your website, you have an executive summary, which is just four ish pages of information that we thought could help guide you in our department.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we have this big book there.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: You have the big book, and then you also have a separate memo, which I'm not going to put up on screen, but it's helpful for you all to have. It looks kind of like this. And you can always resend it if it's helpful, but it came along with the presentation.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Okay.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: And mostly it's a verbal way for me to navigate the large presentation for you all. But I figured it was basically my testimony notes, so I wanted you to have it. In terms of that overview, and Lauren will help guide you on screen, you know, what we are. We are a department of 28 constitutional offices plus a central office, which is where my staff works. We have about 200 employees in our department, and we were established, as we stated, to have a really an entity that supported these county operations. In terms of the pressures that we are seeing, that is really the crux. And also the successes, where we're at on some of the work we've been doing, increasing trials, moving on the backlog. So looking back a couple years, we had about 26,000 pending cases. Today, we have 22,000 pending cases. That is about a 15% reduction over a three year period, which we're very proud of. Represents working with our judicial partners about a 107%, 110% clearance rate depending on, that three year period, which is good. 100% clearance rate means you clear as many cases as your firearm. We had a backlog before that time, so we will need to tick that up over time. Representative Squirrell and I were talking 150% would actually make a dent every year. When we're just doing 107%, we're clearing, but we're not clearing a lot.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Pause for a second.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Yes. Absolutely.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: This is now posted. So if you refresh your screen, you can take a look at it. And do the twenty two thousand so you had a big reduction in cases from '26 to '23 to '22. Is the pilot accountability court included in that?

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: It is included up through December. Even since December, we haven't had a big data analysis since that time. Takes about a month and a half to do the analysis. So we have even cleared more since that time. And about an additional 400 cases have been cleared out since that time period out of Chittenden. If you look at this map when you have a moment later on today, it's also in your presentation. I have some handouts if anyone would like an extra one at their desk. But what you'll see is that in Chittenden County, right now, for the first time in a long time, we're getting near 200 cases per attorney in Chittenden County. That is in large part because of the accountability pilot that we were able to implement. And in that time period, state's attorney George has closed a huge amount of homicide cases because she was able to focus on homicide cases during the last quarter. In that vein, something that's been very successful over the last three years, we have had 540 trial dates used about over the last nine hundred or so days. Over a three year period, looking at the second page of of your memo here, what that means is that, for example, in 2023, we had a 143 trial dates. 2024, we had 219. In 2025, we had a 178. Over that time period, it's essentially a 24% increase in trial dates that we're using. And the trial dates are the major engine to case disposition. Once you set trial dates, cases clear off. On a typical pretrial day, you'll see in a larger county, 30 to 40 cases come off the dispositional list. If So you're setting a lot of those dates, you can clear 100 cases a month if you set a couple of trial dates, for example.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So the trial dates affect pending cases? Correct. So I'm looking at Addison County and we are divorced.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: One of the major areas that when we get into a little bit more of the data, Addison has struggled in the last really two years to move cases quickly. A couple other counties have also struggled and some of it has to do with what's coming at them. Some of it has to do with, in my opinion, the synergies between the system or lack thereof. And Addison has been a place of struggle. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: This is sort of showing it to me in scope. Yes.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Yes. There's a really granular breakdown of clearance rate by county in Addison over a 36 time period has been near the bottom in terms of number of months where it has achieved 100% clearance rate, less than half of the months it has received 100%. So that means

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's been increasing. That's correct. Yep.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: That's correct. So statewide, Windham County, Chittenden County, Rutland County, Bennington County, these are in Washington County. These are our major trial locations. Yeah. And those are also our major hotspots for drug related homicides incidentally. The most critical pressure point that we've seen is about 23% increase over three years in filed homicides. And every year I want to make sure I make this point. A filed homicide doesn't mean it occurred in that year. Sometimes it takes years to investigate a homicide. It just means it was filed and accepted by the court. But we've seen about a 24% increase in filed homicides between 2023 and today. We have a 111 pending today. Our department is staffing a 103 of those a 111 homicides. So 93% of all pending homicides are being prosecuted by our department. In 2023, as an example, we had 90 pending homicides. Today, have 111. What you lose in that analysis a little bit is the fluidity of cases coming in and out. So someone could have been caught on camera committing a homicide and they plead out within a month. That will be not captured in the flow of an annual snapshot, but it's a helpful snapshot because it shows what's being saturated. About 34 homicides were filed in 2025. So that's a lot of homicides to deal with. And what that does is it puts pressure on the misdemeanor cases, the nonviolent cases from moving forward. Moving to that, we have the two pressures, violent crime on the increase, and we have the repeat high volume defendants, our accountability docket. Three or more, people with three or more dockets, 43%. People with five or more, 26% of all the dockets in the state. So a minority of defendants are taking up most of our time. And it is part of the reason that we've been so happy with the progress in Chittenden County because it's allowed our department to see what happens if we open a little bit more space up that isn't dealing with homicides. Right. It's just dealing with misdemeanors. On the second page at the bottom, you'll see this is a another three year project. These are averages, and these are, in some regard approximations, but I wanted you to have clear numbers. 298 cases per attorney in the state. So 300 cases per attorney in our department. Victim advocates, they have about half as many victim advocates as we have attorneys. So they have 600 cases per victim advocate. Admins, an even smaller number, 800 or so cases per. And that is in part because an admin, depending an admin paralegal, legal assistant, some of them in some offices do things like, I'm gonna take the first half of the alphabet, and you take the second half of the alphabet for defendants. They do it different ways, but we use the total number of cases, the total number of administrative professionals, seven ninety three cases per administrative professional. So those are high caseloads, and they do different types of work, but I wanted you to have them because people are interested in them. The attorney caseloads and homicides are on the map that you'll see next to me also included in your packet. Now talking about some of the interesting stuff our department has taken on since the hatings, our traffic safety resource prosecution, and our specialized appellate services. We do about 100% of the criminal appeals in the state through one attorney, Evan Meenen, who over the last three years has filed about 100 appeals. Each of those appeals can be a thousand pages of transcripts. They are very different than a pending superior court case. But he comes to Montpelier and does arguments about once a month where those criminal and appeals most of them are criminal. Some of them are family, cases that are appealed. But you'll note that we have about 18 right now pending. We have closed 81 cases from the Supreme Court docket in a three year time period. And you can see the breakdown by year at the bottom of the second page. In terms of the traffic safety resource work that we do, we have two DSAs. And, Annie, correct me, but with 80% funded through the feds and 20%, we pay through the general fund.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: What's the DSA?

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Deputy state's attorneys. And one is Dennis Wigmans, the former state's attorney from Addison. Another is Matt Dolezal. And they do the most serious cases relating to traffic safety on the roads. I've supplied AOT's data concerning fatalities and crashes on the roads on the middle of the second of the third page. Here's some this is a hard one to talk about because in this year, 2025, we had fifty eight fatal crashes last year, sixty one fatalities. That is awful. However, in 2021, we had seventy four fatalities. So we have seen a reduction by about nineteen percent in fatalities from 2022 to 2025. That is positive, but it's still too many people that we're losing on the roads. That is not counted in our homicide data. So it is an important part of the work we do, and the DUI cases make up, I think, about seventeen, eighteen percent of all pending cases are DUI cases How in the

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: can we compare with states like New Hampshire and Maine, another Northern Arizona, or New England? They're on a per capita, or I don't know how you would do it.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: You can circle back on that.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Do you share data that way that you

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: You can circle back.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I don't

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: know how

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you would compare, because we have different population sizes and all of that, but I would just be curious to know what the trends are elsewhere. Yes.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: As we see a lot fewer law enforcement vehicles on the interstate these days, everywhere. Know tickets are down for speeding gun tickets. So other states haven't seen that same drop. If you looked at enforcement levels, our number of tickets have been given for speeding in various states compared to ours on a ratio basis, whether or you'd see a trend.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: We can look into that comparative piece because I think it's important because it is federal funding. So other states have TSRPs, we can look at what they have too. One thing I wanted to note, like another interesting part of our department in terms of the specialized thing that we do is the transport program, which I know you've heard a lot about. And that data starts on the bottom of page three and moves into page four. Again, our hotbed locations for trials are our hotbed locations for transports. Chittenden, Rutland, Bennington, Windham are locations that receive a lot of transports. In the past, in counting the last full fiscal year, we did 4,035 transports. That is with 25 total FTEs. We have 21 currently filled right now. And and Annie can get into the detail about the pressures, mostly overtime. Mostly overtime pressures and the work we're trying to do with the courts. There's some policy and memo work we've been doing at the conclusion here. We won't go into it, but on transport policy, on block scheduling, on administrative orders to try to curtail overtime because it's really the courts that push that out to us, and then we have to respond. The last page oh, yes, sorry, Wayne. Go ahead, sir.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Representative Mrowicki. Same token, do you have any issues within the folks doing the transport work, whether or not they're managing their time or scheduling, could also impact it. So you get to some of both sides, you've tried to tighten up both sides. Yeah.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: And I'm glad you brought that up, because now I can respond to it. It's both sides. We can work with the courts, but also the employees, and our department has ownership too. And while they all work for me, we allocate them for law enforcement purposes. And Sheriff Harlow has two transport deputies, and that's so that she can supervise their law enforcement certification. They work for the department, their state employees, and I direct their job duties, but their day to day is directed by local sheriffs. And so it's actually a threefold, the local sheriff's supervision as well. So and it is a definitely, it's it can be kind of complex to to work on how to curtail some of that. Annie has a bit about a ten year project curtailing some of that where we're at. One major pressure point, we used to have a lot of per diems out in the field. People that sometimes actually sat at home and they waited for a call to come in to help with transports, and we would pay them a per diem to help where we didn't have a state employee. And that has dropped off dramatically across the state. We do not have people who have retired who are staying here and working as transports to help with the transport pressures as much.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I was gonna raise one thumb. One piece here too. I suspect like during the summer with all the construction stuff going on, our sheriffs were busy with that kind of stuff, even though construction companies often hire professional traffic control people, but they're out there doing that. So I'm guessing probably at that time of the year, it may be more overtime engaged. So state

[Annie Noonan (Fiscal/Finance Staff, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: employee transport deputies during the regular work week only are allowed to do certain duties, which include the transportation of of defendants from the from facilities to the court and civil process and some other stuff that we've designated. A lot of them do work for the sheriff's nights and weekends True. To assist with that stuff. Our challenge to some extent is when a sheriff has their own staff, we call them you know, we say per diem, but they're own staff. A lot of the private private companies will pay a higher per per hour wage than we do. We do $50 an hour, but you can have Pike Industries paying a lot more to that sharer. So it's difficult for the sharer to make that decision about they've made a commitment to a private company that, yes, we'll provide you that service. We're stuck with a transport, and then the sheriff is in the situation of saying, how are we going to do it? Many times, the sheriff's got in the cars themselves and help with the transports because they've made a commitment. And plus, we don't pay as well for per diem hours. We only pay $50 an hour. So we're not competitive to what the sheriff needs to be able to keep that that their own employee employed.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: And then another pressure point just as we get to the conclusion of the our executive summary is just crime trends, what we've seen in Vermont. These are FBI NIMBERs data, which means the National Incident Reporting Database. Shoplifting or retail theft over 2018 through 2024 is up 110%. Theft from motor vehicles, up 85%. Aggravated assault, which usually includes a weapon or strangulation, is up 46%. And murder, manslaughter, or homicide cases, as the FBI calls those, 73%. So those are upward pressures that are coming at our system. And one of the major drivers, and Ken McManus, our legislative attorney, has done a bit of an analysis that took a long time. What are the affidavits for homicides looking like? Increasingly, they're drug adjacent, drug related, and usually have a firearm involved. For a long time, it was domestic violence, which was the major. There's still a substantial portion, but the increase has been drug related homicides in Vermont, particularly on 9189, and Route 7 corridors.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So it would be nice to see the actual number of percentages are good, and so are numbers, because sometimes 100% means going from four to eight. And I'm not suggesting that retail theft has got the debt, but I actually was talking to somebody in another department today and said, you know, they're telling us that we've doubled or whatever, but it went from four to eight. So having the numbers is also helpful.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: We've got those I've yeah. We have the numbers exact numbers by year from 2016 to 2024 in this somewhere, and I will locate

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: it as we as we move forward.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'll put it a 55 page.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Yes. And and, again, we're only gonna go over about 30 pages of the one fifty five. Yeah.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: But to point out what that is, that's great.

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: Just note, sir George is on channel three this morning talking about 25 cases, or 25 repeat offenders, twenty five of them were people that were found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. And so they were very much repeat offenders, probably in the first category there, shoplifting retail theft, my guess. And they just let them all go, of course, because we don't have a forensic facility for that. So if we keep doing that, then we can expect that that shoplifting retail theft number is going to be high. And then secondly, vehicles were listed here yesterday, and talking about paper plates, found that some people are using those paper plates in order to enable them to sell stolen vehicles. Whether or that also would be impacted to prevent that problem.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Correct. On on the competency issues, there's two buckets. There's people with life offenses who have a competency issue, and those are really the forensic facility conversation that's happening, down the hall. The folks who have not committed a violent offense, who have 25 cases or so, who have been found incompetent, really difficult to prosecute. We can't prosecute someone who's incompetent. And as the state's attorney from Chittenden said last night, sometimes those are dismissed in part because our ONH system is pretty broken in Vermont. So ONH, and Annie's right, order of non hospitalization. That basically our designated agencies working through our AHS designated system help to supervise folks through the designated process on ONHs. And they're really hard to engage with. These are folks who are not detained. They're in the community. And then they so and they become, partly for statutory reasons, relatively opaque to victims and to the state's terms. And so if someone's O and H could lapse and then they re offend and people say, what's going on? Why is this happening? And part of it is that our mental health system is really not in step with our criminal justice system, but they are overlapping. And we could spend several hours on the ONH topic, which I won't do for you today, but it is a pressure point. Seven of the people that we've resolved in Chittenden of about, seventy have come back already. But that's a good percentage, but seven have come back for competency issues or so. And that's a it's a real pressure point, even though it's a minority of people. The last thing on this page here, which we'll circle back to at the end and which Annie will circle back to on numbers, is is some of the asks. And some of these from last year are just on the on the wall again. And these are, in my opinion, prioritized. Last year, and I think I wanna own a lot of this, we didn't help in prioritization as much as I think I wanted to, you know, madam chair. And I know that that's an ask from the other committees. How help us prioritize because you're dealing with a huge amount of pressure points. Yeah. In my opinion, and some of the state attorneys and sheriffs may disagree with me, but these are my priorities in this order. Eliminating vacancy savings so we don't have layoffs, increasing operating expenses in some of our real pressure points, expert witness fees, mostly for homicides and mental health cases, transcripts when we have appeals, when we have issues that come at the superior court level. Extraditions, we're bringing a lot of people back to the state for trial. And with that, we're moving more people through the state with the same transport staff. And then transport overage mileage and per diems. We are trying our best, and we're gonna continue to try to get our arms around the overtime issues for transports, but we're almost at 80% of ours for this current fiscal year for overtime. So we're probably when we have a BAA request, and we're so thankful for what you've done in the BAA because it will help mitigate. And then the other piece, our state's attorneys and our sheriffs, I think, all need, and I think I hope in five years I can say I have a more substantial plan, is required training across our whole department. We have a small amount of money for training for the sheriffs, state's attorneys, victim advocates, administrative professionals, transport deputies. And we do our best. We take money from different entities that will provide free training. Equitas is a big one that we often use. But I would like to craft the training regimen in our department that is for Vermont law enforcement professionals. And we can get into more of the numbers on that. And then this is a request from last year that was also in house judiciary's letter to you last year. We're not requesting any attorneys. I think one of the ways that we can be more nimble is with more legal professionals who are not attorneys to help move the backlog. People we can also move around. Okay. A hotspot in Wyndham's popping up, and you'll see Wyndham has a lot of cases, almost 3,000 cases in Windham. We're going to deploy a paralegal to help with expungement ceilings and accountability down there. Victim advocates, their caseloads are kind of out of control, and it's nothing they're doing. They're just accepting cases. And so that is my third priority. I'm sure that since Steve Howard is in here, he will tell you that should be the number one priority. But I would like to get my arms around because whenever you hire a new employee, there's operating that comes in. New things that are needed, office space. So I wanna scale in the direction, avoid layoffs, increase operating expenses where we need it the most. And then if we get those two things resolved, increase staffing for administrative professionals and victim advocates.

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And somewhere you give us numbers for all those, right?

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Okay. Yep. We'll give you that in a nice, simplified form. And and Annie and I can send that to you and and just That

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: would be great.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: And we'll and judiciary, we're there tomorrow, so we'll we'll we'll talk to them too. But I said I promised that I would come in here first before going in there, so I didn't get any of

[Rep. Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So bad, but it's

[Rep. Wayne Laroche (Member)]: not too bad.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont (Executive Director, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: So I'm gonna quickly move through the budgets in some regard with Annie giving more detail on the numbers, so you can ask questions of us. If you move to our our first budget, which is state's attorneys, Lauren will steer to that one. There we go. And so this is just the highlights, and Annie can really walk you through this page.

[Annie Noonan (Fiscal/Finance Staff, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Thank you. So our general FY '27 increase is 5.7%. A fair amount of that comes to us in costs for salaries, health insurance, and retirement. I think you would expect that. Our vacancy savings number that we had to build in for '27 was 330392. So as Tim said, that would be one of our first requests, would basically be to reduce or eliminate our vacancy saving number. It it has an impact across the system. We just basically don't have when we tell someone, hey. An employee just retired or just separated from service, you've got to hold that vacancy because we have to make $330,000 up in our dates. So we would ask first, obviously, for that. Tim mentioned that additional staff being needed, particularly in the administrative and victim advocate roles, six administrative support staff and four victim advocates. And, madam chair, we will get you the cost numbers for those. I we were working on those furiously again last night. I think we've got them down. Tim also mentioned that our mental health costs have gone up. That's true. We've had mental and physical costs going up with regard to our operating expense and our training. We've relied very heavily on the Governor Highway Safety, or now they call themselves the State Highway Safety Office. But it's basically through the agency of transportation, they fund in Vermont two traffic safety resource prosecutors. But they also give us money to help train, which is very helpful. We've been able to rely upon that money from National Highway Safety to Vermont AOT to us. We've been able to rely on that very heavily. But it doesn't allow us to get into it has to be used dedicated for explaining the program and the transportation safety program is all about impaired driving, reckless driving, distracted driving that results in serious bodily injury or death. So that's great. And we do a lot of