Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: And we are live. Alright. Welcome back, everyone. House government operations military affairs just before 03:10 in the afternoon. We are picking up work on h seven six two and act relating to the county and regional governance study committee. We did an introduction, a walkthrough on this last week. And, this is speaking to extending and also what we're doing today is having a conversation with some relevant stakeholders about the charges, duties and the scope of work that's being outlined in the new bill, the current charges of the committee, which Senator Callowar and I are both co chairs of. And so the hope today is to there's a lot of folks who want to see work done within this. This has been a big conversation for a long time and bringing in stakeholders who have had a lot of time and energy insight pointed towards the existing committee, but also have a lot of thoughts on how to move forward with this and how to focus the attention of the committee on more on the details within. So that's kind of what I'm hoping to do here today is start to like refine what we have in that build for the future of work on this huge project. So with that, we are gonna open with Austin Davis. Good to see you, sir.

[Austin Davis]: Good to see you, folks. Alright. I've shown this to me before, but for the record, Austin Davis, director of government affairs at the Lake Champlain chamber. And, Lake Champlain chamber represents businesses and nonprofits, just employers broadly in the Northwest corner of the state. And I actually I have a as part of that work, we have a regional affairs committee, which consists of members of mine as well as partner organizations who work in the, business association space, more at the local level, even more local than we do, as well as other providers in their area. And this group meets monthly, and we try to work on solutions to some of our region's biggest problems, as well as crosscut some of the municipal noise. And it truly is, I think, every single meeting, there's almost like a countdown clock to when people throw up their hands and just in unison say, we really just need some kind of regional government. So, it's it's a need that is ever present for us. And so I appreciate this legislation and the resuscitation of this study committee. We are talking about our twelve month work plan, our six month work plan, including extending up our own task force with similar stakeholders to try to understand what regional governance could look like for our region specifically, working with some of our large employers that cross municipalities and some of our partners. As I want to be clear, yes, we want some kind of regional or county governments. However, we don't wanna just do anything. We want governance structures that enable collective action to address regional problems using nonintrusive, non duplicative, and non bureaucratic methods. Whether we're talking about flood relief, EMS, transit, housing, policymakers, I think, are all hitting the same ceiling, and that's the town line. And nearly a dozen reports that the legislature got this year, as well as, you know, countless pieces of, like, legislative con conversations, we're seeing that Vermont lacks robust regional governance, and it's being identified as a primary obstacle to progress. So for us, it's no longer a question of, like, if we need to move to some kind of county regional government structure to achieve scale and efficiency. But at this point, we're talking about the how. You know, it's, gonna be important to how we address twenty first century problems and build, a customer service experience that Vermonters deserve. And I think that's something that I wanna double down on there and and that is that scale is often talked about as a cost saving measure and efficiency, but I also think this could yield better services. I mean, particularly when we talk about permitting, talk about EMS and talk about other places. Places where we're running into obstacles as, for example, they've talked EMS, first responders are aging out of that system. Folks are having trouble finding, books to fill backfill them. But this honestly feels like, Taeja, a view of of previous conversations around our workforce crisis. I mean, I think about back to 2018, in this building, I had this one week where I was sitting in before we could go to YouTube, you really had to sit in each committee. I'd get up out of one committee, and I'd I'd hear, folks talking about their specific, their unique workforce crisis. And you'd go into another committee and they'd think, well, we have our workforce crisis. And you'd go in through every committee and you'd realize everyone's kind of talking about their workforce crisis. And eventually, you said I had to say to to folks, no one here is actually special. There's there is a workforce crisis. You're starting to feel the leading edge of that. And COVID made us feel that out more more acutely, and now we're in a place where we have a ubiquitous agreement that we have a workforce crisis. I think we're on the leading edge of that in terms of just regionalization. You look around, you know, we have just in this order, this batting order for witness testimony, folks from tax, from public safety, from planning. But, you know, just down the hall, they're talking about how to regionalize education. You know, I sit on the board of a trans agency that's showing the cracks of how, regional government or the lack thereof affects, you know, assessing and planning transit service for our most vulnerable populations. It's really unavoidable. And I think a concern that we have is that it's happening in a lot of siloed locations, this conversation around regionalization. And we do worry, we're piling regional assessment districts on top of solid waste districts, on top of communication union districts, on top of fire districts, on top of, you know, regional planning commissions. And, you know, it's all necessary, but we do need to somewhat standardize and and build borders for folks to work within that. If everyone drives draws their own maps, I think we'll get to some of the same inefficiencies that we're already experiencing and create a bad customer service experience for your constituents. So I'm very glad that you folks are looking at doing this in a deliberate way, and that's, really appreciated. I mean, we want to build a twenty first century Vermont, but right now, we're kind of dealing with nineteenth century government, dealing with twenty first century challenges. We don't want this to be disconnected, duplicative, and we certainly don't wanna delay it anymore. So I think in terms of direction, that this might go, I do think it'd be really important to start inventorying existing county and regional government structures, looking at all services and determining what's appropriate at a municipal, at a regional, and at a state level. I think we all have our own things that we certainly look at on a day to day basis and say, why is that happening? Why are statewide education property taxes collected municipality by municipality that then have to deal with issues of individual taxpayer delinquency, while still remitting to the tax department, for example. I was just talking about that this morning. And then I think, you know, we wanna talk about once we've inventoried and decided, talk about building those boundaries around what entity, who's who's going to tackle those in those regions. And, you know, so we don't have situations in which a constituent of yours might say, well, I'm in this county, but I'm in this solid waste district and this fire district. Making those more uniform and understandable for that better customer experience is very important. Understanding where it'd be beneficials. And then enabling municipalities to really take on the things that they should be doing or build the regional structure they feel like they need to within those boundaries. Remove duplicative elements of municipal government, build efficiencies, scale, you know, thinking about just the conversations that have been happening last few weeks with the extreme cold we've had, and the extreme amount of snow, where municipal every municipality this time of year is having issues with maintaining their roads, but then they're also having issues come summer when paving their roads. Would that be better suited for at a county level? And then I think, you know, we'd really like to see how we can take the strain off of so many volunteers. I think Vermont's really blessed by having such civically minded folks that we lean on in many of these governance structures I've talked about already, whether this be EMS and fire or communications union districts or transit agencies or all these, they're really heavily dependent on volunteers. And a lot of those volunteers are fantastic, but, they're also strained and many of them serve in multiple locations. Many of them are also aging out of the ability to serve as volunteers. So how can we professionalize some of that? How can we make those folks more advisory and offset some of that work to elected folks, who are also, to some extent, compensated for that time. That's something that regionalization we see actually puts a lot of promise in as well. So, and then finally, I'd say, how do we fund multi municipal initiatives is a really difficult question. From the perspective of the Lake Champlain chamber, our destination marketing organization, Hello Burlington, is right now under the process of working to build a convention center for the region. It's something that by not doing, we have actually foregone about $70,000,000 over the last ten years of conference and event business and rooms and meals tax and sales tax revenue. And so we we want to build that type of infrastructure that's needed. However, in the state of Vermont, it's very difficult to do that in partnership with just a municipality. And it won't benefit just one municipality. I always think about, I'm sure many of you, like most Vermonters, when you talk to them about their first show they ever went to, it's a lot of times it's a Memorial Auditorium. But now when we talk about how do we foot the bill for repairing Memorial Auditorium, it's a Burlington taxpayer problem. So it's a Burlington taxpayer problem, but it's a regional asset for everyone who lives within driving distance of it. And ideally, we'd have a method that everyone in that region could contribute to that regional asset that we all benefit from despite where it eventually is the brick and mortar location of it is. That's a really big question we're grappling with. How do we do how do we have nice things that we see in other states, you know, large convention spaces, performing art spaces, attractions? How do we fund regional initiatives that tell folks our story and attract, tourism through marketing without, you know, when we're hitting the same ceiling as I discussed earlier, which is the town line ultimately. So I do have a lot of really good answers, but I hope that I had some kind of pointers there, directions to go, and happy to continue engaging with you folks in conversation, about this legislation, as well as, work along in parallel and conjunction and assistance to this committee if this legislation goes forward. Rep. Waters Evans, Benfisk. Thank you.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: This question I think I could ask or will ask if everybody who survives today, but can you speak to your experience talking to people who think this is a great idea as long as it's not in their town, or who think that regional or county government is great ideas, as long as they don't lose any control over their municipality. I think in theory, are all good ideas. And I also think I'm from Charlotte. And when I ask my constituents, you know, what would you like to see different? Almost universally, the answer is absolutely nothing.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: We are happy with things the way they are, except for their taxes, of course. So, you know, do you do you hear from people about this? Or do you have an idea about how we strike that balance or?

[Austin Davis]: Time marches on and things change whether we want to or not. And I do think that we're in this precarious moment where, if we don't move towards this, we're going to end eventually create it whether we like it or not. You know, I was talking to someone from Addison County, just last week about two schools that closed in their area, and they were talking about how and I know that's, know, it's a difficult subject, but they were talking about how by the time that it came to close, it actually just was that they ran out of students, didn't have a critical number of students to even have the school open. And, you know, I think we oftentimes kind of push back on changing things, but we're just delaying the change that is inevitably gonna happen. So in the context of municipal government, I mean, there might come a day where we just can't staff municipal road crews, And we're just the staff we can get, we're basically just ping pong between four municipalities that are neighboring as they go from one to the other for chasing a dollar raise every six months and eventually just ending back up in your municipality when you raise the wages. If we had a county road crew, we could just get out ahead of that. We could start actually developing a ladder for folks who are on that road crew to get towards management, not just be one of two road crew members in that small town. And then we think about, like, just the the experience of an everyday Vermont. I don't think they realize how difficult things are. You know, in my region, you can steal something from a retrailer in Williston and get on a bus that's barely getting paid for because of an outdated charter. That means that assessments can't necessarily happen. And then get to another municipality and law enforcement actually have a difficulty interacting. There's just all of these, like, in just one instance of retail theft, you could almost have six layers of municipal government in it, you know, and it just drives inefficiency. And you think about how difficult it is for, you know, your constituency, my members, to navigate these town lines that feel very arbitrary. Or in our destination marketing initiative, it's called Hello Burlington, and it talks about the entire ride market of Burlington. When we have visitors come in our visitor economy, they talk about how awesome it is that Burlington has a ski resort within the city limits. And people go, well, that's actually not Burlington, that's Bolton. Go, I don't care. At the end of the day, these lines that we all think about as very important are kind of imaginary, they're also holding back progress and shift like cost sharing, resource sharing and all these other things.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Repinisal and Repubaruper.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault (Member)]: I can see some goodness out of this. For instance, county court costs, it's basically grand less. So, I'm from Dorset, we pay almost 50% of Bennington County's court costs, which we probably might have two people a month to court, where the other smaller towns who pay little of nothing for the court costs are monopolizing all the time of the court system. So having some sort of governance in how it gets paid for other than through brand list values is another Maybe towards user fees or something. I don't know, but it's astonishing every time we get a court bill, is how much we're contributing to their annual budget, and how little we use it. But then when you get talking about fire departments, they're so fierce. Every fire department's got a sign up front looking for volunteers. And it's, so regional fire departments is probably a sign of the future, when you can get a larger department and maybe even have to have some paid firefighters on call, so that you're not drawing from all the

[Austin Davis]: different regions and then going out. And then supplementing with volunteers as well.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault (Member)]: Right, sort of like the rescue squad. Some

[Austin Davis]: aspects of government, it makes sense to have counties. And I I think to kind of articulate again, you know, my last response, I think it gets to a point of I think we like to talk about just, like, fierce independence of each municipality, but we're also interdependent. You know, folks from Charlotte will will inevitably love to drive to Burlington, to do their shopping, to see a show, to eat out, you know, all these things that aren't necessarily in in Charlotte. And so, you know, you need clean streets. You need, to address the unhoused crisis. You need to address the opioid crisis in that area. You need you know, you need all of these things. So there needs to be some level of cost sharing to address those things at a county level, some mechanism to do that. But that requires also some level of buy in and control from those folks in Charlotte as well. So, you know, it's it's a car and a horse situation. Like, yes, they would they should help out, but they need some control. So that leads us back to we need some kind of version of of county governments. And, you know, I know you're gonna hear from Charlie Baker, later, and there's folks who are talking about, you know, different many different options. There's a council of governments, you know, option where you would have every town select board chair at a table talking about how to meet their region's challenges specifically. There's there's also, you know, more, small scale ways of going about this. You'll hear about, you know, Wyndham Regional Policing Model potentially. But I think we're all understanding that one way or another in the next decade, we're going to have to start sharing some of the load and the responsibility and the decision making together because, you know, time marches on and doesn't care about our finite borders, you know, our town bonds.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: Super. So this is a big spike on the highway of driving somewhere in the broadband of a flat tire. You bring up Burlington Auditorium, which is a really good demonstration of why you need to get rid of local government control. So I paid taxes every year to keep Memorial Auditorium repair being functional, and I don't know that went. But I'm sure a lot of points are very valid to expect people to do fire or police or pick any of the other combined municipal endeavors that causes somebody to say early to knew of this much, it's been you of this much and it's not in voters' hands is a really big jump I think for people here. And I'd like to know if you know, well two things I'd like to mention. Did you say 70,000,000 over ten years in Rooms Appeals Taxes? And did you know if you're anywhere this has been done without actual sacrificing municipal control?

[Austin Davis]: So I don't think we necessarily need to sacrifice as much municipal control as we think. I think that there are Let

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: me Yeah. What do you do to make sure when the bill comes up for the convention center that everybody actually pays? Well, I

[Austin Davis]: think that's something that, you know, whatever model is going to have to identify. You know, they're going to have to identify how that works, and I think the state's gonna have to be a partner on that too. I think I think they're all spending that money. It's a question of, like, can they pool resources? You know, not an expert in municipal government necessarily, but, like, as I understand, you know, municipalities can't necessarily bond together. They can't necessarily, you know, enter long term contracts together. And they can do those things individually, but they can't do them together. So they're not getting the benefit of scale. You know, I I would say from my personal experience working with, you know, Green Mountain Transit on that board, just the inability yeah. So it's to the inability to kind of build a consensus with the folks who are on the board versus the folks who are leading each select board or, you know, city council is difficult. So you you wanna almost, like, cut out a layer and have the select board chairs and city council presidents all in one room together. You know, that's that's the emphasis on the cog model, for example. But, you know, it's we're very unique here in Vermont to not have county government, you know, and which is incredibly ironic for a state that is the size of counties in other states. So I think it's long overdue. And I think, as I've pointed out, I think as we deal with our demographic crisis, our, you know, the increase in natural disasters that we're seeing that don't care about town lines, and just our interaction with the federal government. Time and again, we're seeing that, you know, we need need a bit more scale to our decision making. And I don't think it's antipathical to local control. I think it's just, you know, it's about partnerships between municipalities to all that you said that achieve mutual agreed aims. Well, certainly. So 70,000,000 is in foregone business, in terms of Concessions. So tax would be a percentage of that. Okay. That's also difficult just because and this gets back to, when one person in the region does well, everyone in the region does well, you would think that when we start talking about a convention center in Burlington and we say it has it likely has to be within five to ten minutes of the airport that you would hear from folks saying, like, oh, I don't want that. I'm in Essex or I'm in you know, name other communities further away. But the general managers in all those hotels, they understand compression. They understand spillover. They understand that if the thousand room nights in Burlington are filled because we draw a convention in and we throw in all these people with their per diems that anybody who wants to come to Burlington for that time period as well can't book a room. So then they have to go twenty, thirty minutes out and they experience a new part of Vermont, maybe they haven't before, and then they come back and then all state revenues in this rising tide is lifting all ships. And I think it's a good lesson for just how this regional governance can work. Know, it's, I think we're all looking at it from a perspective of like, well, what can it take from me, but what can it do for us all? You know, what if we could together collaboratively, you know, look beyond just our own municipals' resources to combat regional challenges, I mean, that's a powerful message to bring forward.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Anything else, Robson?

[Austin Davis]: Well, thank you all. Your time is record. Or to partner with you further.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Up next, the digital Charlie Baker. Hi, Charlie. Good

[Charlie Baker]: afternoon. Thank you, Chair Birong and members of the committee for allowing me to testify virtually. Appreciate that. And for the record, Charlie Baker, during the day of the executive director of the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, and oftentimes or most of the time when I'm testifying in the legislature, I'm testifying on behalf of the State Association of RPCs, is called VAPTA, the Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies. And so I'm here really speaking here on behalf of all the RPCs with you tonight because, or today we've been talking about this issue a lot as it's coming up very frequently. And one point I would like to make sure to let you know is that between the RPCs, VLCT and even UVM did a study this past year called Virta, which kind of I never remember, I'm sure V is Vermont, I can't remember what the E is, but rural technical assistance. But they did a survey of town officials and we've done surveys of town officials. There is really a lot of interest. One of the main recommendations that came out of that Virta study, if you're interested, I'll share the link that you can check out later. The Leahy Institute did it, but one of them was to really look at this issue of regional governance. Know, are there other ways to provide services more effectively, maybe more efficiently, and to take some burden off of really largely volunteer driven municipalities that are, most of them are struggling to provide the services that they're expected to provide. And this is something we hear consistently and it's not around one particular service area, it's across the board. You've already been talking a little bit about public safety. I just talked to my peer in the 2 Rivers region. He's been asked by a few towns to provide select board administration services, so he's doing that. Zoning administration, a few of us are providing those services to multiple towns, planning services of course, a lot of us help support the creation of communications union districts for broadband services in our regions, solid waste, some of us are supporting the solid waste districts, but you know those are typical multi municipal organizations. Assessment, you know the legislature dealt with that over the last couple years right and moved that to the state level of government with a regional model embedded in the state model. So I just kind of make that point to say there's this is really an issue that is coming up a lot around a wide range of services And there's a lot of concern and anxiety about how to, what our future looks like if we don't change our system. The point that Austin just made about elected official accountability and local elected officials, I think is a very big one. I think I don't think anybody wants to add more government. Like we have plenty of government for 650,000 people. It's kind of, is there a way to restructure and make it more efficient? Definitely one of the things that has been bubbling up, and I think you'll see some of it in the Virta recommendations, but we've been getting this feedback also of just wanting to make sure that local elected officials still have that elected accountability. You know, think there's a concern with, you know, like even RPCs in my job, I'm not elected. I got appointed by a board. Some of my board are elected officials and some aren't, but is there a way to you know make that more accountable to the public by making sure elected officials are on boards like mine? As the RPCs have been talking about this issue, we're interested. We think there's an opportunity to evolve what we're doing because we already have the municipalities at our tables. And then I guess I have a do have a definitely support the bill, Mr. Chair. And I appreciate that you're making some amendments to it to extend the deadline and change a little bit about who how the chair is elected. I have a couple suggestions maybe. One of them I sent to your staff assistant Nick there, but it would be helpful I think to add another thing to look at which services that are currently provided at the municipal or state level might be better provided at the regional level. A second question is it'd be helpful to start the conversation about how are these things funded?

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: Know, are they just,

[Charlie Baker]: know, one model might be kind of like we do solid waste districts and other services now where the towns are kind of, you know, get a bill, an invoice from that service and we do the same thing. All the RPCs collect dues from our towns, we invoice our towns and they pay it. That might be one model or you know should they be something analogous to the assistant side judges you know who are actually doing some some I don't know exactly how that system works but that would be interesting to know because they are, I think, doing a budget and a fee that is then incorporated into the municipal property tax or at least

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, component have of sort of like budget review analysis and execution within their charge of duty. So that is something that exists within that officer's scope of work. Yeah.

[Charlie Baker]: Right. And I don't know if there's something there to build off of. I think we're kind of watching with interest the conversation in the Wyndham Sheriff and trying to basically form a board of municipal officials, as I understand it, to, you know, oversee the services he provides, which kind of begs also the question of like, is it that board or is it the side judges that have some kind of that budgetary control and revenue raising control. So anyway, just point made, you know, the revenue and how that works. And I think the accountability elected officials, I guess, be kind of my third point, is also, I think, really key dynamic that has been coming up out of conversations that I've been a part of frankly over the last probably ten years. And I should, maybe I should have prefaced this. I've, you know, been in Vermont, it's getting close to twenty years, so I'm pretty new, but I worked for two county governments and two regional governments in the Greater Philadelphia Metro Area before moving up here. And, you know, people, county or regional governance, you know, think it really depends on the model. The Council of Governments model has been interesting in that it would have the local elected officials be that board. I sometimes have been calling it in Vermont the Council of Towns, just to be a little more plain speak about it. And then interestingly over in New York State, they have a variety of flavors of county government, but one of those flavors is where they have the board of supervisors is the county legislative body and it's essentially the select board chairs for the towns make up the legislative body. And I think there's like 12 counties in New York that operate under that model. They have like four or five different models in New York State. So anyway, just throwing that food for thought. It's probably more appropriate to bring to the committee when they start getting back to work, but it's fun to plant some seeds with you.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah. And and no, thank you for that detail, Charlie. Like, within, I guess, I have a question within what you just said right there with that council of town structure. In New York, how many individuals would that be at a county level? Like ballpark, do you have any idea?

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah, I think I don't think their counties are too different than ours, know, so 20 ish towns, you know, in a county is not unusual. I think I saw there's one county that has 5,000 people, which may be a little smaller that uses that model. But another, I think the largest county is Saratoga County and it's, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, a few 100,000 people. So, you know, there's kind of a range there in New York.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, no. And you're right. That's like a better thing for the, I'm going to say we as the co chair of the committee to start refining within that work. In the side judge conversation, it hadn't come up with a couple of other people who have been evaluating this for a while. Any questions for Charlotte right now from the table?

[Rep. Kate Nugent (Member)]: I was just wondering if there are any policy barriers right now to towns working together that you're aware of, just out of curiosity, maybe aside from the study, or if there's ways that towns and cities want to work together that legislature could help with?

[Charlie Baker]: Yes. And I will you know, we provided the kind of chief staff support as both as we formed the Communications Union District, but we had to create a new municipality essentially, right? And had to take it through the voters, created a new municipality. We did the same thing with towns when we created a public safety authority when we were looking at regional dispatch a number of years ago. You know, the CUD worked because the state funded it. The Public Safety Authority kind of has not succeeded really out of a funding gap for capital at the front end. And I bring those up a little bit to say, you know, it kind of works if there's money, doesn't work when there isn't, shockingly. But the bigger barrier is frankly the fact that we don't have a regional government structure that makes it easier for towns to work together. We spend a lot of time working with our towns trying to help them do things together. Sometimes they're able to contract with one another and that always works fine. But it is a there's a differential in the power structure there, right? One town is contracting with another, the other controls the service and provides it. We just watched Hinesburg and Richmond go through a pretty lengthy conversation to see if they could share a police department. And from my outside view, I wasn't a party to that negotiation, but it did collapse over this governance issue. I think in particular, Richmond really wanted to share government governance and share control of the service, and I think Heinzburg really wanted to contract their service and just get paid and have a more of a contractual relationship than a governance relationship. So sorry, Representative Nugent, that's a long answer, but it's really we don't have a really a structure that really allows them to just say, you know, hey we'd like to contract with the whatever the regional government, whatever it is, county government and provide that service and maybe multiple towns are doing it and maybe all the towns are doing it, but the structure just isn't there to make it easy. And so it is really hard for towns to share governance on a service without creating, having to create a new government. That's really the model that Vermont has, the Union Municipal District. The two examples I just mentioned about the Communications Union District and the Public Safety Authority that we created here were essentially Union Municipal Districts, so we had to go through that whole process in order to have shared governance instead of having a shared governance model that's already in place that towns could take advantage of.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault (Member)]: Yes. Thanks, Jerome.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I know that Tim needs to get out of here in, like, eleven minutes. So, Charlie, do you mind hanging for a second in case somebody's got a

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: question for you? Or

[Charlie Baker]: do you have something I also have a 04:00. Great.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I'll see you later. We'll do more of this.

[Charlie Baker]: Happy to come back anytime.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yes. No. Thank you for your time, Charlie.

[Charlie Baker]: Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye bye.

[Austin Davis]: Hi, sir.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: How are you?

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: Good. How are you?

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: Good to be back. Was

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: I here this week or last week? I can't remember.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Last week. Today's Tuesday.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: That would make sense. Yeah.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: It's all blurred into one. Hasn't it?

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: Who knows?

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: I could

[Charlie Baker]: have been here.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: Tim Leader Summa, Department of State Attorneys and Sheriffs. I figured I'd start with a quote from a supreme court decision because I think that's what you all, let know. But, really, this is from town of Stowe versus County of Lamoille. Is anyone familiar with this 1976 case? So, you should be. The Vermont County is a unit of special function. It operates as an electoral district for assistant judges, state attorneys, and sheriffs, well as, in some cases, state senators and probate judges, and only you know the complexities of the other piece there. Its judicial district it is a judicial district for the superior court and some probate court systems and maintains courthouse facilities. A county has no territory which it governs in the sense that the state or the town governs. It passes neither statutes nor ordinances. All of its territory is overlain with state sovereignty and underlain with contiguous town government. In those few words in these in those few voids known as unorganized towns or gores, governmental functions are exercised by supervisors appointed by the state except for the special statutory designation in Essex County. All this to say, for many years, this has been a odd conversation. This decision from Lamoille essentially put into place the system whereby county funds may not be used for law enforcement purposes. So that's why county funds that the side judges oversee can't be used to pay a cop to do county work. You can pay a secretary to help with administrative services, and that's very limited in the statute. But in 1976, the bounds of why we can't pay for police. Why? Yes. So there is a decision. It will be on your website for you to enjoy some other excellent quotes. Another, interesting quote from this just as it's very topical is the limited nature of county governmental operations carries with it a further restriction. Since this agency has no generalized governing function, any implication of power with respect to carrying out any functions has been assigned must be viewed as a correspondingly abridged action. So in the court's view of what you are all talking about, they're struggling with it as well. What is the Vermont County? And in 1983, your this body created my department because we didn't have county government, and you were sick of hearing from 28 county officials about what they needed from the resource perspectives. It goes further into the tension between providing county sheriff's work and how that overlays with municipal work. No one ever questions when the select board chair swears in the chief of police and all the people in the municipality with police, but that's because the taxpayers are paying for that service directly. There is an ambiguity about that. So this is an in it's actually a very interesting decision that I think reads really well today, but it is something that we butt up against. And as we all know, county revenue, no taxpayers are voting for county revenue. They have a public meeting. They say, here's how much is going to be levied, then they as you were talking about, they can then use it, but it's for limited purposes. They do they can provide spaces for sheriffs to work. States attorneys, it's a it's a mix. We pay some private landlords. We we have some in county offices. We have some in state buildings. It's a real scattershot. And you look at our budget, you're like, why is the department paying for water and gas in one building and not in another? It's as of where we we're set up. In terms of the larger context, if you look in some other jurisdictions like LA County, which is the opposite of Vermont in so many respects, they have 18,000 employees that work for the LA sheriff's department. And they have a pretty particularized role. They cover all of the areas that are not governed by municipal agencies, which is a lot of huge expansive areas. But that's the scale of difference that that we're thinking about here. Obviously, that's more employees than we have in the state in terms of state employment by a large at least a couple of factors. But that's, you know, an inter you're looking at other states, the scale is very interesting. In terms of seven sixty two, I think the conversation should continue. We appreciate being involved in that conversation, and happy the deadlines are moved out and will absolutely, be as helpful as we possibly can. Our scope is really about public safety, and, you absolutely are engaged in this other conversation about, a bill starting in the other chamber s two five five on the Wyndham County, pilot that sheriff Anderson can talk to you all about in much more detail than myself. Three, converging factors are really what drives a lot of these conversations from our perspective. Financial instability in the current model, at least as I'm earlier and as you're dealing with in here, relies heavily on individual municipal contracts in terms of sheriff's departments, law enforcement coverage. If one town pulls out, sometimes that means an officer needs to be fired. It can't sustain a person having their employment because the contract's no longer there to support it. It takes about twelve months to recruit a new person and then put them in a car or a location and have them be certified to do law enforcement work. So we can't turn on and off in terms of what the sheriffs do. It isn't like, oh, we've got someone waiting in reserve. It takes about a year. And then the patchwork of coverage. As we know, most law enforcement agencies are having issues with staffing. And so if a sheriff isn't providing law enforcement to a particular municipality, sometimes VSP is also very stretched. And if they don't have a municipal agency, it's a gap, particularly when you're dealing with issues like lack of cell phone service as well as geographic issues in terms of getting to and from. So those are some of the broad issues that we've seen. And again, some of the sheriffs can provide much more granular what they see in their communities. I would continue to encourage what I think is an excellent testing ground conversation, a narrow conversation on s two five five, the Wyndham County pilot. Because I think in the law enforcement realm, can kinda suss out and sort of talk through hypotheticals in the context of s two five five. But if anyone had any questions, that supreme that decision from Louisville County is on your website, at at some point and available for you to to read as as kind of a helpful document as to why we're here, really, I think, in terms of some of the gaps that we're talking about. And, county government is, described in a borderline humorous way in that decision, but it's not, it's not unfounded here. It clearly has limitations. Yeah.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Oh, thank you. That was a lot of information in a short period of time. Thank you for that very concise delivery. We have questions for Tim right now on his components.

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: Always happy to come back. Yeah, no,

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: no, no. And this is not the end of this conversation, as you know, we've been having this chat for a long time. So, and yeah, no, I'll just stop there. Know you're

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: getting One other thing I was going to mention is our department also provides funding to an existing inter municipal entity space, which is the SIU program, special investigations units, that do particular types of law enforcement work. And sometimes, they have local boards. Those boards are comprised usually of law enforcement partners, DCF, local law enforcement. And then we grant those boards dollars from our, grant fund from the department to do certain types of work. But it is an interesting area of statute that, in my opinion, does deserve a little bit of cleanup at some point, not this not this session, because it it has been a helpful way to do a particular type of thing. But if there was an umbrella, like what may be created in s February, you wouldn't need to create SIU particular statutes. You would just have an entity to to put it within. So you wouldn't need to create a special statute. So I think this conversation's very helpful and would potentially impact in a positive way the SIU funding that we do. That's really it for me, mister Jay.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Alright. No. We will definitely pick up the conversation with you at a later date. So I appreciate your time and pushing up to your Day day care calls. No. I knew exactly why you had to get gone at 4PM. Yes. Yes. Alright. And finally, Jill Remick. Is that

[Austin Davis]: how you pronounce it? Alright.

[Jill Remick]: How are you? I'm good. How are you?

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Good. First time here?

[Jill Remick]: Yeah. So, yes, this is my first time in this committee, at least in this new room. I'm sure at some point I've interacted with the prov ops. So my name is Jill Remick. I'm the director of the Division of Property Evaluation and Review, which is a division in the tax department that works with municipalities to administer statewide education tax system and also everything related to maintaining the statewide education grant list. So we work very closely with municipalities on a day to day basis. And the reason we've been eagerly following the regional accounting conversation is because, as Mr. Baker mentioned a little while ago, for several years, we've been working with the legislature to try to find ways to deliver reappraisal services to municipalities in a way that makes sense and can help us get caught up. And so last year was the second of a few different bills that have basically created a regionalized assessment district model. And so just for background, in most states, you probably hear that a lot when you're in this regional and county governance conversation, but in a lot of states, the responsibility for carrying out reappraisals and assessment work is done at a more county or district level. We do not do that in Vermont. So right now, every municipality is responsible for contracting with a contractor to do their reappraisal. And the reappraisal is that regular reassessment of all the properties in your municipality. So this is beneficial for the education grant list and also for the municipal grant list on which all of our property taxes are based. And so, over the last several years, we've had a bit of a snowball effect where, property values were changing significantly. We get fewer and fewer people in the field to be able to do the work. And we were really finding that, especially some of the smaller municipalities, we're not actually even finding a contractor who could come in and conduct their reappraisal. By all means, I'm happy to answer your questions. I feel like this might be a committee that knows a bit more about municipal governance average fare. And so in a lot of our research, we worked with national organizations. We've held stakeholder engagement groups. We really wanted to find a way to basically help municipalities join together to conduct their reappraisals on a regular basis. So there is now in statute a six year reappraisal cycle. And then most recently in Act 73 of 2025, the establishment of these regional assessment districts was created. It is created basically based on county. There's 12 total, so the smaller counties, parcel count wise of Essex and Orleans County are one, regional assessment district, or RAD, and, Grand Isle and Franklin County are one. So we now have this structure statewide of these regional assessment districts, but there's no entity on which to place this responsibility. There's no entity that will organize this work. And so that's why we've been following this closely and are hopeful that it can continue to happen. We've also considered school districts as some sort of proxy for the regionalization structure. That might be another way of grouping that makes sense because the way that our statewide education property tax works, there's one district budget, and then each municipality has a slightly different tax rate depending on their common level of appraisal, which is another piece that our team does. But at the end of the day, we kept running up against there's no there there. So there are municipalities who very much want to work together to do whether it's their grand less maintenance work or whether it's their reappraisal. There are definitely towns that are being left behind by reappraisal firms, rightly or wrongly, because it's a lot of work to do some of these really small municipalities. So there's interest in helping each other out and working together, but there's really not a great way to structure that. Same goes for things like property tax appeals. Right now, are individually done at every single BCA level. And that's a lot of appeals every year held by those BCAs. So there are municipalities that are very interested in sharing resources. There are a couple sort of pilot programs that are happening in Lemoyle County. But they're very individual based and they're very dependent on multiple select boards reaching that agreement and multiple select boards continuing to agree to that and divvying up the cost of the contract. So you have individuals right now for brandless maintenance who are maybe doing a lot of part time work in several municipalities. So we're really interested in following this conversation. We see a lot of value in sharing some of that burden and some of that also, frankly, contracting and economy of scale at a larger level than municipality by municipality. We are very strange in Vermont that we do a lot of these things at the micro level like that. So we're just continuing to add to the pile of folks. Happy to see that this work will continue.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Part of what you were saying there, I'm going back to Austin Davis' testimony where I think one of the concise taglines coming out of his testimony was like, we're trying to solve twenty first century problems with the nineteenth century structure. And that one really resonated for me. It's just like a baseline of what purpose behind this.

[Jill Remick]: And you can see it coming from two ways when it comes to property assessments. So we have local elected listers and part time or appointed assessors who are doing this day to day grant list work, including a lot of things, frankly, that the state puts on them, like homestead declarations, current use. Those things are not going away or getting easier. So it's actually harder and harder and harder to find folks to do that sort of micro level work. And then also on the other end, when it comes to property valuation, you need enough data to actually make your property valuation, your figures make sense. You need some sort of quality data. And if we're doing this sort of municipality by municipality, that's challenging. The other thing we've heard from the reappraisal of contracting firms is that different towns have different land records in different shape. Some towns may have permitting and zoning and some may not. So when they're bidding on a reappraisal project, they can pick and choose whomever. We have a backlog right now. They're contracting out to 2031 right now. And and they don't wanna take a smaller town to see all their parcels that whose land records haven't been, you know, touched in ten years since the last time the the reappraisal happened. So they don't they don't they can't find anyone to

[Tim Lueders-Dumont]: do work. Get a contract.

[Jill Remick]: It really sort of has a perfect storm. So if nothing else, we would like a way to help stand up the municipalities that can't find anyone to do that work at a minimum to sort of get them to get the attention that they need.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I personally, and I'm just going to say that personally it's me, had seen this play out in my community out North of San Jacinto County, and that there's been a difficulty not only getting listers to run, but once they're appointed to stay. And then I've also witnessed the process with the difficulty of finding the outside firm to assist and then the time that it takes. And then people wonder why CLAs are all out of whack. Yes. That's even if you're And I'm not saying this in a dismissive way. It's not like the average person's charging duty to understand CLAs, right? Like this crazy algorithm algorithm we used to apply. So I've seen the frustrations of this system play out, like, within my own community. So I'm, like, I'm very conscious that as we discussed this, that's why I was very enthusiastic to find out that he and the tax department wanted to come in and offer insight. So I think that is a very important thing for us to address research and offer a recommendation on how it plays out. So there's my editorial for today. Any key questions from the committee for this slug of last witness of the day? I'm the last

[Jill Remick]: thing standing between you and going home.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Must, like, stand in between me and on a journey. Yeah.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: So

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: with that, any any answer or further questions or commentary from the table? Seeing none. Alright. Well, thank you very much, Jill, and we will definitely chat more as this plays out. I appreciate it. Alright. That is a wrap for the day. We will be back tomorrow morning, at 9AM for work at the ERVELT.

[Rep. Robert Hooper (Member)]: We did.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: That was a dense afternoon. Thank you, committee. I appreciate you working