Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good afternoon, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Farmers and Economic Development. It is Wednesday, January at 01:20 in the afternoon. We'll be getting our afternoon testimony. We can be a big pardon from the Human Rights Commission. I think it's it's fine we've had anyone hear from the Human Rights Commission. It's great to have you.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Thank you so much. It's the first time I've been here. Thank you. And I really appreciate all the time that you're giving me today. So for the record, I'm Vic Hartman. I'm the executive director and general counsel at the state of Vermont Human Rights Commission. I use theythem pronouns. I brought handouts. I don't know if anyone likes those, but I do. I have hard copies of our annual report, which might be helpful to flip through while we're I wanted to give you a little bit of an overview of what our office does and how it might pertain to some of the matters in your jurisdiction, answer any questions you may have, and go through a little bit about some of our current policy recommendations that we're making. Okay, how's that sound? Great. Do people want handouts or you like don't give

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: me I'm

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Herb Olson)]: a paper guy.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: They're also on our website. Yes.

[Michael Boutin (Member)]: If it's what I've got from there

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: That's fine. That's fine.

[Michael Boutin (Member)]: I'm all about saving trees.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: Yes.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: And if there's extras, I'll bring them back to my office, and I will use one for guiding myself. Yeah. Here, I'll come

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: and grab them. I do.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: All right, some committees love the paper, you know. Just a little bit about me, though. I have been an attorney practicing in Vermont here for twenty years after graduating from Vermont Law School. I have a background in labor and employment and worked for the VSEA for about seven years. Then I went out on my own practice, and I was primarily doing consulting with small business businesses and small employers. I named my law practice Welcoming Workplaces because I was really geared towards doing prevention of discrimination and harassment in the workplace. And then for the last four and a half years, I've been employed at the Human Rights Commission. I started as a staff attorney investigator. So I was investigating complaints for about two years before Borjeong, my predecessor, left her position, and I became the executive director at the very start of fiscal year 'twenty four. So now I've been in that position for two and a half years, and we are extremely busy. I wanted to give you an overview of our functions. A lot of folks in this building really don't know what we do and that we are an independent agency of state government. So we're not under an umbrella agency or department. We're an independent commission. We have five commissioners who are appointed by the governor for five year terms. Our chair is Kevin Coach Christie, and he's been the chair since 2018. And then we currently have nine staff members, which is the largest team we've ever had. When I started at the HRC in 2021, we had six. And so we've had three positions come on since I've been director. Last year, we got two additional positions. So when we're looking at our fiscal year 'twenty five report, that doesn't reflect those two new positions or the work that they're doing now. So at the back of the report, I may not have included this in the documents that were emailed, is a mid year summary of how how we're doing data wise so far this fiscal year. With the addition of a staff attorney investigator, that takes us up to four. So we have four investigators who are tasked with conducting discrimination complaint investigations. And we have a full time litigator, a senior counsel, who does our enforcement work. That is the position that was created in 2023. And then we have a director of community engagement. That position used to be the director of policy education and outreach. And you might know Amanda Garces, who was in that position for about five years and is now with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We also have an executive staff assistant and admin that supports the day to day operations. And this year, we also were able to hire a full time intake coordinator, which was desperately needed in our office to answer the phones, respond to email inquiries, and help get cases from an inquiry phase to a complaint being initiated. So our office has jurisdiction over three main areas. And if you want, we can go through the annual report. I can talk to you a little bit more detail about what those three areas are. But broadly, we're talking about fair housing. These are protections against discrimination in housing. Places of public accommodation, which a lot of folks don't know, is we're all protected from discrimination when we go out in the public and receive services from a business, a public entity, the government, schools, all of those things. And then we have a small segment of the employment discrimination complaints in the state. As you probably know, the Attorney General's Office Civil Rights Unit handles most employment discrimination complaints. But when those complaints are brought against the state of Vermont, a little bit of a conflict there, right? So those cases are all handled by our office instead. But there's no overlap between the cases they take and the cases we take. It's very distinct. Okay. So that's the big picture. So I thought I would go through what's in our annual report and give you a little bit of a summary of kind of what we're up to, how I've seen things change and evolve over the last four and a half years since I've been here, and where we hope to go in the future. How's that sound?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Great. Great.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: You're all with me. I love it. After lunch is the worst time to talk to people.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: I mean,

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: you're a little drowsy, but I'm gonna try to be interesting. I welcome any questions along the way.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: We usually vote like that all day. Great.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I appreciate the transparency about that. So when I open up to page four, this is an overview of our process. And I also have more paper for you, if you're interested. A couple of years ago, I created this guide for complainants and respondents. That's an overview for people who have a case with us so that they understand what our process looks like and what the flow is and try to address a lot of the frequently asked questions that our staff were getting all the time. Could I pass a few of these down? Maybe just a few. And that is also available on our website. So that has a more in-depth breakdown of our process. But roughly, there's four general stages. The first is intake. And this is the term we give for anyone who's reaching out to our office saying, I want to know if I can file a complaint with you, or otherwise, like reporting discrimination to us. We really do a thorough vetting process through intake because there is no way we would be able to investigate all the complaints that Vermonters want to bring. We only have four staff attorneys, and that is up from three. That has been what we've had for the last several years. And so while we're doing an intake, we're really it's a very time intensive process of making sure we give good customer service to talk with someone about what's happened, assess whether it's in our jurisdiction, and see if they have what we call a prima facie case of discrimination. That they're able to say, was let's say, for example, for housing, I was denied a reasonable accommodation request in my housing. And I think it was because that is a version of disability discrimination. And so if they're able to establish or at least they don't need to prove it, they just need to be able to articulate a prima facie case of discrimination, then we often will try to see if we can accept that case. I cannot accept every case that articulates a prima facie case of discrimination, again, because of resources. We would be backlogged for years. And already, our cases take too long by everyone's estimation. So we will consider our current caseload, how intensive we would expect an investigation to be, and other factors to determine whether we can accept a complaint for investigation. If we can't, we try to provide a meaningful referral. Same if we don't have jurisdiction over the case or it's just not something in our wheelhouse. We will try to provide a meaningful referral. And I want you all to know it's become harder and harder to do that. There are fewer and fewer agencies and nonprofit organizations that are going to take referrals from us. Historically, we would often send folks over to nonprofit organizations like Vermont Legal Aid is often a party that is representing and doing advocacy for people who have housing issues. Whether it's discrimination, eviction, landlord tenant stuff, that office is really suffering with a lot of cuts, including cuts caused by the federal administration. They had a round of layoffs this summer, and we are seeing the effects of that at our office. Likewise, Vermont Legal Aid will often do intakes with folks and refer them to us to file the complaint. We're getting fewer and fewer of those as well. So that means we're doing that first line communication. We're doing that intake. It just increases the demand on our office when there isn't a lot of other folks to field those requests and inquiries. But if we get to the point where we decide we are able to accept a complaint for investigation, our staff actually typically drafts the complaint based on what information we've collected in the intake phase. And then once we finally get a complaint underway, it has to be signed and notarized per our statute, and then that initiates a complaint investigation. So we assign an investigator who is going to send notice of the complaint to the respondent, the party against whom the complaint is filed. They have a certain amount of time to provide a written response to the allegations in the complaint, whether they admit them, deny them, or have some other version of what happened. And then we also give them time to produce documents that are relevant to our investigation and a list of witnesses. Then our investigator goes about interviewing, under oath, all the witnesses we possibly can that might have relevant information. So that's complainants, respondent witnesses, maybe third parties. Sometimes there's police reports involved, other third party documents we're trying to compile. And throughout the investigation process, our staff are also tasked with trying to see if conciliation is possible. Conciliation being the fancy word in our statute for settlement. So we don't want to have cases go all the way and take years and maybe end up in a lawsuit. That's usually not to anyone's benefit to have that process run its full course. And a lot of times, we're able to help the parties as a third party go between. We don't represent the complainants. We don't represent the respondents. We can be the nice little middleman there to facilitate conversations about what do we need to have happen to make this go away. And sometimes that results in the reasonable accommodation being granted, some financial compensation for some harm that occurred. And we like to also see in our settlement agreements some what we call public interest relief, something that's going to help us feel like we're not going to have another complaint filed against this respondent next week. So we like to encourage them, if they're willing to agree to it, to attend a training with us, establish new policies or practices that might help prevent a complaint from being filed in the future. If we aren't able to facilitate a conciliation, we do write our investigator will write a detailed investigative report summarizing the course of the investigation, what they were able to find out. And then they do a legal analysis, where they make a recommendation about whether or not and this is per the statute whether or not there's reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred. If there is reasonable grounds, then that finding, which is actually a determination made by the commissioners, that determination is actually a matter of public record. Up until that point, the entire existence of the complaint has been confidential by law, meaning the HRC can't provide information about any complaint that's under investigation to in response to a public records request. But each month, the five commissioners meet and do pretty informal hearings of any investigative reports that were finished in the prior month, and they make a vote in the public on whether or not there's reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred. If there is reasonable grounds, it opens up this six month time period in which our statute says that we're going to again try to work on conciliating the case. And that's when a lot of cases settle, because now everyone sees the facts. They see what the HRC thinks of it. And often, the respondents are more willing to come to the table and try to work something out. Whereas in the investigation phase, they're more often to be like, we didn't do anything wrong. We don't see what the problem is. They're a liar, whatever. And so we do have a pretty good track especially in fiscal year 'twenty five. We had a lot of good settlements result after we found reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred. And our settlement agreements is the only other thing that's a matter of public record involving our complaints. If we are not able to do conciliation in that six month time period, we file a lawsuit. We have the ability to file a lawsuit where the Human Rights Commission is the plaintiff, not the individual complainant that brought this case. And we pursue those in the public interest. And generally, we are not taking all the cases to court. We just only have one attorney and no paralegal to do that work. But we're definitely because we just got two years ago, this full time litigator, we do have more and more cases in court than ever before, by a long shot. But if the case finds no reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred at the commission meeting, that's the end of the case. It's closed for good at our office, and none of that complaint is a matter of public record. So that's our process. Nice and easy. Right? Simple. Any questions about all of that? I know I just dumped, like, a whole bunch of information on you. You're doing great with it.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Okay. Is there

[Unidentified Committee Member]: any appeal level above you guys? If you find there's no basis, can the agreed party go anywhere else, or is that it?

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Great question. They totally can. And they don't even have to come to the Human Rights Commission first. People have the right to file claims under these three sections of our statute at any time. They don't need to come and get a right to sue letter from us or anything. It's to their benefit to come to us, because they'll get an investigation done. They'll get their day. And so it's not really an appeal. If they want to file a lawsuit after our investigation is done, they have the right to do that. The reality with civil rights enforcement, though, and the reason that all states have an agency like ours and the federal government has agencies like ours, is that if we didn't have a public agency enforcing these statutes, the folks who have been discriminated against are never gonna bring their own claims. There's very few attorneys who are representing complainants in these cases. Vermont Legal Aid is almost the only ones, and they have one attorney now who can handle the discrimination caseload. It is not enough. There really aren't very many discrimination attorneys in Vermont, and it's such a time intensive type of litigation that civil rights enforcement really happens by state and federal agencies doing the enforcement ourselves.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: Yeah.

[Michael Boutin (Member)]: You mentioned that in some cases, you have to bring lawsuits, and I assume people are getting sued and damages are paid out. What happens to that monies that if there's a settlement and monies are paid, where does that money go?

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: With a settlement, we almost always are negotiating settlements where the payment is going to the person who was harmed. We're not trying to rake in a bunch of money that way. We have had some settlements that have resulted that took a lot of attorneys' fees. And so there was a portion of a settlement that went to our special litigation fund, which is created by statute. And that is there to support us if we need to hire paralegal, a second attorney. Sometimes we do use it to contract out with attorneys to help support our one attorney doing all these cases. We can use it for expert witnesses. Trials are very expensive, and there's nothing in our general fund budget to support anything beyond staff and everyday operating expenses. But almost always, if there is a monetary outcome from a case, it's going to go to that individual who's aggrieved. Now, we haven't had a case go all the way to trial since I've been here, go all the way to trial and get a jury award. But that outcome could be civil penalties, which we believe would go to that special litigation fund. We're entitled to attorneys' fees and expenses if we prevail on any case, so that would go into the special litigation fund. And then still, a jury can award compensation to any individual who's harmed. In our lawsuits, they're called the aggrieved individual. All right, let's move on. Okay, so I'm turning now to page five of the annual report, which is an overview of our case data. And I am kind of a nerd on the data. I want to know how we did this year and how measured up to last year and the year before that. You know, some of us really like this kind of stuff. I'll try not to go too into the data for you because it's really my little world of geekdom. But if we're looking at the overview, you'll see that we had 57 new formal complaints. Those are complaints that our office initiated for investigation in fiscal year 'twenty five. 28 of those involved fair housing, so that's more than half. And then the other bulk of them were places of public accommodation, and then we had five that involved state employment, and five that involved both housing and places of public accommodation. Then we had a really good year of settlements, and we were able to settle 26 cases. 11 of those were before we had to go all the way to a determination. So that's a big jump from last year. We were really happy. We didn't understand why the year before we had very few, what we call, predetermination conciliation agreements. We did think it was a fluke, and it was. This year, we did much better. And then we had seven that settled after the commissioners had found reasonable grounds and three that settled after we had already gone all the way to filing a lawsuit. And then there are there folks can settle privately. If they have a case going on, they don't want it to be in the public record, they can settle privately amongst themselves and then withdraw the complaint. They can withdraw at any time, but we did have five that withdrew with a settlement. So that is a good outcome for us, we feel. And then we had more determinations than ever. We had 35 determinations this year. More than half were no reasonable grounds, which is a big flip from the year prior in which we had more than half be reasonable grounds. And it's just a variation that is reality. It's not like we're just stamping yes on every complaint. We are really scrutinizing the claims, and we really take a lot of pride in ensuring that we do really comprehensive investigations, and we don't make recommendations that aren't based on the facts before us. Out of the reasonable grounds determinations that we had, which there were 15 total, seven of them were in fair housing, five were in places of public accommodation, and we had three complaints against the state of Vermont that we substantiated. And we completed a total of 53 investigations. So this is a common theme, if you'll see, we initiated 57 complaints and we closed 53. So that leaves us with some cases that didn't like each year, we have more cases open than we close. This is the closest those two numbers have been in a few years. So I'm pleased about that. Trying to what I've really done as director in the last couple years is streamline our investigative reports. They were extremely long and cumbersome to write. We were like footnoting and citing every single sentence to the record or to case law, and it was taking months to write them. And I just did not feel that that was providing the level of public service that was demanded in these times. People cannot wait three years for an investigative report to get issued. So I, while not cutting corners in our investigative process in any way, I have streamlined how we've written investigations to enable investigative reports to enable the commissioners to hear more cases than ever before. So that's the overview of our data.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: What's the nature? Can you quantify how much backlog you have?

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: It's difficult to do that. And we've noticed some trends that some types of cases just take longer. We definitely prioritized fair housing cases in the last couple of years. We've had a cooperating agreement with HUD. We get paid when we close a case with HUD. They pay us per case. So I prioritized accepting those, and I prioritized closing those. So I had like one and a half investigators that's like, you're just doing the housing cases, crank them out. Then the public accommodations cases tend to be a bit more complicated, and they take longer. That's only using state law, and it just those tend to take a couple more closer to one and onetwo to two years. Employment cases sometimes take more like three. And that's just reflection of where we're prioritizing those cases. Like housing is also like someone is in that house right now being discriminated against in a lot of those cases. They need that reasonable accommodation now. It's pressing on their lives. And so that's another reason that we prioritize those. Did I answer your question? Oh, the question was about the backlog.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, can you quantify it? I can see the reasons for staffing up now and not processing as many as you get in, but.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: It's difficult to quantify. What I can tell you is that when I arrived in 2021, I was handed a stack of cases that were all two or three years old and had not really had any substantive investigation done on them yet. And that was horrifying to me. That is not what is happening now. Our oldest case today is probably two years old because of things that happened with the parties that weren't because of our delays. So we really have worked to streamline, and we have been able to increase our staffing. So we have four investigators now. But another big place of backlogs is in the intake process. So this year is the first time this fiscal year is the first time we've had one dedicated staff person who's not doing anything other than intake. Before this, it was our admin, our executive staff assistant, who was primarily doing all the admin support for everyone in the office, everything with commission meetings, and Oh, and all of our invoices and everything. Answering the phone, responding to emails, and drafting complaints, doing intake meetings. And it was bad. People were waiting six months to get a response, and we were never able to answer the phone. And it was really people will lose faith in your office when you're behind that much. We still have folks that have been waiting six months today, but we have a better process in place to try to get them streamlined as much as we can. I still feel like our intake coordinator came on in August. He had already worked in the executive staff assistant role at our office, so he was ready to hit the ground running. I didn't have to do six months of training with him, which I would have had to do with anyone else. And he was immediately handed, like, over 100 files. You know? Some are in the phase of, We need to call this person back from June. And some are in the phase of, they've been through the intake meeting, can you draft a complaint? And so that is a very heavy burden on our team. We all feel the weight of how many cases we have and how old they are. But I do think our backlog has improved. And part of that is that I started denying more and more cases last year. You may have heard in the news, I went public about it, that I was feeling like I was consistently having to deny people investigations because of bandwidth of my staff. I have seen six staff members leave in four and a half years because of burnout, almost exclusively because the job is so demanding. And everyone is dissatisfied with you all the time because you're behind, and it's just so much to keep up with. So whenever we have that staff turnover of investigators, everything's kind of frozen in that case until someone can get hired, trained, and start to pick it up. And so I don't know so that does sometimes contribute to the backlog. But I have my team now mostly prioritizing the oldest cases. And most of them were initiated in fiscal year 'twenty five. So we're proud of that. That's like a major achievement now for improvements to our functioning. But it still is something that I have to do every day, is say no to a case, no to a complaint. In the next page, on page six, you can see a little bit about how when you take all of the people who contact us about a complaint. Last year, we logged about 700. I know there were more. I know that we didn't log every single inquiry that came to our office. But let's say the number was 700. Out of those folks, we created and this is down in the little picture chart on the bottom right corner, we created two seventy three intake files from those. So that's like a filter of like, you're not articulating enough for us to even think about creating an inquiry file in our case management system. Out of those two seventy three people that got an inquiry file, we conducted intake meetings for 113 of those folks, and we were only able to accept 62 of those complaints. Overall, in fiscal year 'twenty five, I declined 106 requests for investigations. Those are folks that had extensive communications with our staff, often submitting documentation and a complaint questionnaire, sitting through an intake meeting with us, wanting us very badly to move forward with the investigation, and us just I couldn't have accepted them. If I did, we would have a backlog of 106 cases. And it's a really, really hard choice to make every single day. It's the worst part of the job. And that is something that, when I do talk to legislators about our work, I was really, really grateful that having these conversations with committee members last year resulted in the creation of a full time intake coordinator position, because we were drowning without And even if we did accept somebody's complaint, they'd be in this intake phase for, like, six months or more, you know, and then the investigation takes another year and a half. I mean, it's just and the whole time, you're like, I just wanna be able to, you know, get a ramp on my entrance, to my home, things like that.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: You had 62 new, I guess, claims that you accepted. And of those, is that where we go back to the 57 or is that from the previous year that were heard and 53 completed investigations, is that from those 62 complaints? Is that are those two different years of information?

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yeah. The investigations we completed in fiscal year twenty five, most would have originated in fiscal year twenty four or '23. But some We did get some completed within the same fiscal year. Not very many.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: Go ahead. Is it about 40% that after they go through the whole process are found to be upheld?

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Discrimination? Discrimination.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: The information in this annual report shows about that number. And so I'm just curious, is that an average year or is that

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I don't know, but I can say the year prior, it was like sixty six percent of our cases were found to be reasonable grounds. So it did kind of flop this year in the other direction. I'll be curious to see next year where it goes. And I could look back and do that percentage comparison. But as you move forward, what you'll see and you can see it in the bottom left hand corner of page six we accepted a lot more complaints than we ever have in the last two years while I was director, while also feeling like we are routinely turning people away that we know are never gonna be able to go to court themselves. They're not gonna get an attorney to represent them. And now, a lot of times, we feel like now this agency has let them down after they feel pretty let down by a lot of other agencies and entities in Vermont. I'm making an assumption that you're taking the strongest cases. Is that a bad assumption to be making? I don't think that the strengths is necessarily a factor that I consider. We do have some identified areas of enforcement priority. So fair housing is one and school discrimination cases are another. So there are some areas that are like, this is important for us to look at. If we don't look at it, no one else is going to. And I try to up those. But yeah, certainly if somebody's giving us some really flimsy reason why they think what happened to them was discriminatory, that might help me feel a little bit better about declining that investigation. But we really don't make them prove their case. It's our job to investigate it. And we would prefer to take more and give that its fair shake than just decline and never even get to the bottom of it.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Herb Olson)]: So, I feel your pain.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Herb Olson)]: I had a few times in my career where was in a somewhat similar situation, and and it really is painful. I did the the consumer assistance program up again. Yeah. For the one when we were just sort of in the transition of trying to organize the speech and develop sort of the ties to the office. And maybe it was it was difficult then. And then the regulatory agencies frequently have processes too. And they were much more organized and well staffed as quoted, so it was much bigger. So I do feel your pain, really. Are other state human rights commissioners having similar problems? I don't wanna identify, I can see that you've made a lot of progress, but I'm just curious, what's the atmosphere nationally about this kind of function of state?

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: So I'm very close relationships with the New England HRC equivalent directors. We meet monthly and kind of are like, Are you okay? What's going on? Everyone is fairly in the same boat, But we all are working within different statutory processes. Some of my counterparts don't have the ability to decline cases, so they just pile up. But they have more power to dismiss them without an investigation. They can do kind of like a preliminary, and they do a lot of dismissals early on that we don't I really try not to dismiss cases without them going all the way through our investigative process. The backlogs in other states are brutal, and everyone is thinking about how can we improve our process so that we can serve more people, so that we can do more work amidst funding challenges and the housing crisis. I mean, when the majority of folks that contact our office are talking to us about housing, and the majority of those folks are people disabilities and are facing a lot of barriers already, are very scared and anxious if their housing is in jeopardy or if they're not able to get housing. And it's very gut wrenching to be in a situation of not being able to investigate that. And then when you have more when you go through a year where more of your determinations are not reasonable grounds, you're not pleasing a lot of those folks, you know? And it's not like we're there to please anyone, but it's not a satisfactory process for them to wait a year for an outcome that is closing the door. I think, though, we really try to be fair with that, And I do think that we have credibility with some of the big housing providers that are not in front of us for the first time, that they felt like they got a fair shake sometimes. But no, we're all in a tough situation. I want to make sure we talk about housing a little bit. So I'm going to have us turn the page, because I know everyone's talking about housing. And we feel the crunch of the housing crisis on a daily basis with folks who are staying in discriminatory situations in housing because they can't afford to go anywhere else. And they might endure discriminatory situations because there's no option for them. But I want to give you an overview of fair housing. So our federal our state statute is in many ways mirrored off of the Federal Fair Housing Act. But we have several additional legally protected categories under our state law that don't exist in the federal Fair Housing Act. And just last year, at the end of fiscal year 'twenty five, the legislature passed the housing bill contained two new legally protected categories, immigration status and citizenship, so that folks cannot be discriminated against based on those characteristics. And on page eight, you can see a breakdown of the bases for the fair housing complaints that we received. And you can see that more than half of them alleged some type of disability discrimination. Now,

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: here

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: is where another crunch is happening across the country, which is that most HRCs across the country participate in what's called the Fair Housing Assistance Program, the FAP program with HUD. And that program is being very effectively dismantled as we speak. And the way it has worked for decades is that the federal HUD does not do its own fair housing investigations. It contracts with state agencies that have substantially equivalent statutes to do the investigations themselves. And then so anything that someone wants to file with us that's fair housing, if it also falls under the fair housing protections under federal law, we dual file it with HUD, and then HUD pays us to do all the processing on that complaint. And likewise, HUD might receive an intake for somebody and refer it to us to do the investigation. Those cases are dual filed at our office and at HUD. They are not paying us. They're supposed to pay us at the end of each year for all the cases that we closed at the end of that year. So that process of like tallying it all up usually happens in July at the very start of the next fiscal year. And we say, Okay, you close this many cases. If you file a lawsuit, you get another chunk of money to help compensate for the time doing that litigation, and they total it all up. So when I became director, I saw this contract as one of the few places we could really grow our budget. I was like, all right, good. People want more fair housing investigations. We'll do more. We'll get paid more. We'll be able to get more money from HUD each year. It's been hovering just under $100,000 for the last few years that we've received under this contract. So we did really good on our fair housing cases in fiscal year 'twenty five. And they told us that we had earned about double of what we had budgeted to receive. So we were slated to receive $187,000 And I was like, all right, we're going to do testing, we're going to do outreach, we're to do education, this is going to be amazing. And they usually pay us in August or September for the prior year's work, and we have not received that money yet. And they did tell us right before the shutdown, there's going to be this new voucher process this year, but we still haven't received the voucher. And we have not received a cooperating agreement for the current fiscal year. Instead, we have received a memorandum from HUD. All the FAP agencies across the country received a new set of guidance documents for the FAP program in which we are going to be expected to agree to these mandatory provisions that a lot of the other federal funding streams are being asked to sign on to. So this is going to be a promise that our office doesn't do any DEI work, which is like most all of our trainings are related to DEI, that we're going to agree to the executive order regarding gender ideology, meaning that we do not recognize gender identity, even though it's a legally protected category under our state law since 2007, and that we will not do any disparate impact findings of any kind. This is not like, you won't use our money to do this. This is like, your agency will not do these things, which really puts us at odds with our statute and our statutory functions and the mission of our organization. Just for clarification, DEI work means you can't take disability cases. Yeah, it's also about trainings that you give. I do a lot of harassment prevention trainings across the state. People love it. It's preventive work. But it does you would absolutely say that it fits in the category of diversity, equity, and inclusion work. So if they ever do give me a voucher to sign, I expect the voucher will say, you agree to the mandatory provisions. And I don't see how in good faith I can sign that and still fulfill the function of our office under our statute. So thankfully, we don't need the entire amount of money that we were slated to receive to make it through this fiscal year. But we are in the budget adjustment recommendations for this fiscal year for just a little tiny $25,000 that we think will be just enough to make it through the year with salary, benefits, and operating expenses for our team. And Big has to let go of the dreams of all this outreach and testing and education that I was hoping to do. So we also do not expect that we will receive any more funding from that program in the future. They have advised all of our FAP agencies across the country that they're doing a new substantial equivalency review. And if your state law has more protections than federal law, you're going be out of the program. And that is how they are going to eliminate all the blue states from the FAP program. So they're really effectively, outwardly dismantling fair housing enforcement. And it really falls upon us as now like the last line of defense to do everything we can to amp up our work in this area. And I want you all to know that discrimination is on the rise, Hate is on the rise. Harassment is on the rise. And many of us in the civil rights community feel that we need to amp up our enforcement and prevention work around those issues. Yeah. So that's the world we're in right now. And I'm going to have us move on because I want to talk a little bit about I know I'm almost out of time. I want to talk a little bit about public accommodations discrimination because this is where I think it really does have a significant overlap with a lot of the considerations that you're working on every day. So places of public accommodation are basically any place that serves or provides services to anything in the public. So it's any business, it's any type of school, a public school or a private school, and it's any kind of local or state government entity. So we end up investigating other agencies within the state of Vermont if someone believes that they have discriminated against them in their provision of services or denied them services because of a legally protected characteristic or refused to give reasonable accommodations. But in the last couple of years, most of our public accommodations cases have, or many of them, have involved schools. And we are very concerned about the increasing reports of harassment that students who are members of protected categories are experiencing in our public schools, especially. So out of the 20 new formal complaints involving places of public accommodation, nine of those were against schools, and seven of those nine involved harassment allegations. I have one attorney who just came on this summer, and she has a full caseload of school cases. Majority of those involve race. Some involve disability. We don't do special ed issues, though. It's very clearly separate from our jurisdiction. Some include gender identity, sexual orientation, and national origin. These cases are gut wrenching and very difficult to investigate. You know, you've got to talk to teachers. You know, you don't want interfere too much with, like, other children or what has happened. But basically, schools have a legal obligation to take action on harassment that they know about that's happening in their schools. This is an area, in terms of public accommodations, this is an area that I really want to be able to do more outreach and education. I think a lot of businesses do not understand that there are anti discrimination protections that apply to them. A very common example that we see is service dogs. People with disabilities have a right to go anywhere that they would be able to go without a service animal with their service animal. Service dogs. And we still have routinely been dealing with reports of businesses that don't understand that they can't deny someone access because of their service dog. We should be able to get ahead of this. We should be able to do a public service campaign where we're educating business owners and employees at businesses, retail establishments, hotels about these basic rights. There's very clear guidance on what to do with this. We just really need to get the word out. But our office has never been given any type of outreach or education budget. So we do what we can, and we do use the complaint process as an opportunity to educate. But we do feel like we would have fewer folks calling our office about discrimination if we were able to inform the business community more about what their obligations are under the law.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Go the other way too. I own stores, so I've had people come in with all kinds of different animals saying peace of mind. Emotions. Word animal can't be without it. You can't stop me from bringing it, that type of thing.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Oh, it totally goes all the way. And those are conversations we want to have with business owners about what are the rules here and what are the expectations. And I think for folks with disabilities who rely on those service dogs, when this occurs once in their life, it can have a drastic impact on their sense of freedom in the world moving forward. And I've seen folks who call us and they say, This isn't the first time this has happened. And actually is really a traumatizing event to have to find that because you rely on a service dog, you can't go somewhere. You don't have access to the community that everyone around you has. Do have

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: business organizations? They could help you get the word out.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I would love to.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: The Vermont Retail and Grocers Association.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I really would love to be able to do that. What we've done with outreach and education is I do a lot of trainings. I love doing trainings. It's like one of my favorite things to do. And I'm only one person. I can't be everywhere at all times. What we tend to do is if someone asks us for a training, we'll come and do it, or we'll do it because they agreed in a conciliation agreement to do the training. But I really think that there's proactive education and awareness that I really wish we had bandwidth and capacity to offer to the public, because I think most business owners really want to do right by Vermonters. And we also see a lot of tourists. Tourists can file complaints. We see a lot of tourists who feel they've been discriminated against, either because of their skin color or because they have a disability. And that's something that we get ahead of that. I think we really can. But folks think, oh, it's my business. I can do whatever I want. People think that about being landlords too. It's my property. I can do whatever I want. Well, there's there's laws. We'd love for you to know about them so we wouldn't have to do an investigation against you, you know? But that's that's one of Big's many dreams is to have, a little bit of space to be able to do that proactive education and awareness. And there's really never been a budget for that. We used to be able to get a little bit of money from HUD just for fair housing awareness work. That's dried up, obviously.

[Michael Boutin (Member)]: I'm just just something of interest, far as the service dogs and emotional support animals. I don't know what kind of relationship you have with the Association of Realtors, but they have an excellent CE about service dogs versus ESAs. I was talking to someone about it in a line in New Hampshire, and I had a woman who had a service dog come

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: to me, and

[Michael Boutin (Member)]: she says, where did you learn all this stuff? I've never I've never known anyone that understood it as well as you did. Nice. So as as maybe you could use that as a curriculum to bring to the business communities. Very informative and something I keep with me daily. Great.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: Do you have the statutory ability to charge for

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: trainings? There's nothing in the statute about it, and I have begun charging for trainings so that we can build a little bit of an outreach budget. So like a

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: trade group could pay you to come to their conference and do training. Great.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yep. And when we do settlement agreements, it's usually contemplated that whatever training we're gonna offer for you, we're gonna put the fee in there. And so we've been able to build a little bit, but like we are a public agency. So if I was doing this in private practice, you know I'd be charging a lot more. I charge about $500 for an individually delivered training in person, three hours long. And we do offer free fair housing trainings every other month that are virtual. So if you have any folks you know that might be interested in that, it's on our website. I do it. It's awesome and very informative. But yeah, it is another place that I don't love it. I think it should be a free service for a public a state agency to offer information about state requirements. That should be something that's happening for free. But folks that ask us for trainings I also do workplace harassment prevention trainings, and I typically charge $500 for those. I start to feel uncomfortable asking for a whole lot more. Yeah. So lots more to talk about. I'm going to skip over employment because it really is a tiny piece of our world. We should talk more with like GovOps about state government employment. But I thought you might want to see on page 14, overview of all of our complaints and what the legal basis for them has been in the last year, as well as the location of those complaints. So you can see if your county is doing well or what. And this does vary, the location of complaints. Chittenden's usually the highest, but And then another thing I always like to highlight is our improvement in the age of our cases at completion. So on page 16, you can see that fiscal year 'twenty three, before I became a director, we were right around six fifty days average length of an investigation. Six fifty days, I just need to like, that's how long people were waiting for an outcome, whether it's respondents or complainants, nobody was happy with that. I didn't think it was acceptable. I understood why, which was largely a matter of turnover, staff turnover. Fiscal year 'twenty four, even though we had some turnover, we were able to get that average down to just under five hundred days. And fiscal year 'twenty five, we got it much closer to a year. The average was $3.66 days. So that's massive improvement. I hope we can stay in that range or under moving forward. But still, that feels like an age for folks. That feels like it takes forever. And HUD fair housing cases, they contemplate us finishing every investigation within one hundred days. I don't know any agencies that are actually able to pull that off. It means that the complaint comes in and you can work on it right away. That's not reality. The complaint comes in and you prioritize your older cases, and that case takes at least six months before you can pick it up. But that's the overview I can offer for you, and I don't want to go over on time. But we also, I'll just mention that this fall, we did host our first ever hybrid civil rights summit. It was in Randolph, and we had over 300 people attend that summit. One of the documents that I sent to the committee is the policy recommendations that came out of that summit. Those are really driven by the community service providers and advocates who wanted to speak about these topics and move some policy items forward to ensure that regardless of whatever the federal government is doing with civil rights right now, that we have strengthened them here at the state level. And so I urge you to take a look at that. We're going to do a press conference in the Cedar Creek Room next Friday at lunchtime, and I'll hope to get in front of more committees with the subject matter experts from the community to talk more about those substantive proposals, many of which already have kind of bills moving around them.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: Thank you. No, thank you very much.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I was like, how am I going to fill an hour? And I only got through you know, 80% of what I wanted to, but that's all right. I will be in touch with you if there's anything going on that I think you might all might want to know about, and feel free to have me back if you have any special topics you want me to cover. We will. Okay?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Vic Hartman, Executive Director and General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Thank you so much. Really nice to meet you all.

[Unidentified Committee Member (possibly Edye Graning, Vice Chair)]: Thank you. Thank you. All right.