Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Alright. We are live. Alright. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to government operations and military affairs. It is Thursday morning just after 9AM, and we are doing some more testimony and, from witnesses on Public Records Act. We have a couple of people are on a tight timeline. So we're gonna start off with our guest on Zoom, Tommy Gardner, who is the publisher of Vermont Community Newspaper Group. How are you doing today, sir?

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: I'm doing okay. Can you hear me?

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yes. We can.

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: Trying to turn my video on. Hold on one sec. Start video. There you go. Hello. Good morning.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Hi, Chea

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: Hi, representative Chea Waters. Waters. Chea Waters. I see another local representative Boyden there. Hello, Lucy. So, yeah, thanks for asking me to come here. It's I was asked fairly late minutes, so I I've got a ton of thoughts, you know, swirling in my head. I've been a journalist, you know, in Vermont for twenty years. And so I you know? But having to put it down on on paper is kinda what I do as a as a reporter. My so I I did that. I'll just take it away. This is my first time testifying in a house committee or any kind of committee. Excuse my stutters and ums and ands. So, so, my name is Tommy Gardner. As I said, I'm the editor of the Vermont Community Newspaper Group. We publish five hyper local community weeklies. We have the News and Citizen, the Lamoille County, the Stowe reporter, the other paper of South Burlington, the Shelburne News, and the Citizen of Charlotte and Ninesburg. And I've been the editor and chief of these papers for a little over over a year now, and I regularly hear the experience of my reporters in their efforts to seek public records. But before last year, I've been a reporter, as I said, in in Vermont for twenty years. And I made a lot of public records requests in my day, and I've used all manner of request methods. I've used everything from the the terse emails citing one VSA three sixteen chapter and verse to, you know, hey, John, can I get a copy of that thing you guys are talking about at the select board meeting last night? The way I've always been taught about it, you know, as far as public records go is if you're a public official and I ask you some for something, whether it's through the email or over the phone or via text message or just bumping into you at a meeting or in line for coffee, it's that's a public records request. I I still haven't found anywhere in the public records laws that require a person, whether a journalist or a citizen, to deliver their public records requests in any particular method with any particular legal verbiage. Although, you know, oftentimes know that agencies and government officials do prefer them to be a little more formal, but, you know, oftentimes it's you know, the informal request is a great way to get things started, and that's usually the way I do it. I thought it might be helpful, I guess, to provide some examples of public records. Like I like I said, I've done countless of them and and a lot of and a lot of journalists have to put on that, you know, that not just just their journalist hat, but also their their their local, you know, citizen ordinary citizen hat. And so a few examples, a handful of examples, meeting minutes for last week's school board meeting, you know, showing who was in attendance and what policies were discussed, what actions were taken, or the information packet for tomorrow's select board meeting, the same one that all the select board members are looking at and thumbing through during the open session. We can all follow along at home. A lister card for that property on Main Street to see what the town appraises it for and how many bathrooms it has. The voter checklist from town meeting day to see how which school board members voted on the budgets and which one stayed home, the highway department's salt and sand expenditures over the past five years, particularly these past two winters, the number of deer hunting and moose archery permits issued by the Fish and Wildlife Department, a death certificate, campaign finance reports, property deeds, cemetery grave plots, a list of zoning permit applications received in the past twelve months, the town's noise ordinance, the school's anti bullying policy, high school sports team rosters, graduation programs, budget spreadsheets galore right down to the most granular line items, salaries of every municipal or school district employee, union contracts, police incident arrest and traffic traffic ticket logs, which list the basic when, where, what, and who of every police interaction. This is something that at least three of our local police departments send us on a weekly basis without, yes, even having to ask at this point. These are all public records, and they're all things that I can get on a regular basis from any town hall or supervisory union office, often simply by swinging by or shooting off a quick email asking, may I have this? I didn't include on that list other public records that we, as journalists or citizens, requests, things like public officials, emails, correspondences, criminal charging affidavits, prearrangement, internal investigations of public employees even after the investigation wraps, demographic student information, police body cam footage, electric power purchase agreements, bid proposals, contract negotiations. With all those things, it's often understandable that a little time is needed to scan them for things like social security numbers, names of minor children and trade secrets or other non public information. The key phrase here, though, I think is a little time. The recently sorry. I'm getting a lot of notifications here. The recently formed Vermont Journalism Coalition, I sit on its public policy committee, has recently supplied testimony opposing the Vermont League of Cities and Towns proposals for revisions to the public records laws. Those include extending the time to fourteen days to simply respond to a public records request. This seems to make less sense as more and more municipalities, school districts and government agencies communicate via email. Already the law allows for three days to reply and a ten day extension for complicated requests, something that can already provide a significant barrier to the public's access to its government. Now, don't know about you, but if I'm looking for information on that, say that burglary down my street, I don't want to wait for nearly a month if the custodian of that information decides to take the maximum time allowed to make to respond to my request. Or if I'm on the fence about how to vote on my school budget, I don't want to wait till after town meeting day at this point to find out how much the school district's paying for its support staff are spending on its basketball uniforms if it takes the maximum amount of time to respond to a public records request. And I'm also skeptical about the proposal to allow municipalities to quote recover the true cost of producing records and redaction. In an era when the vast majority of public records are digitized, think it takes very little time and effort to quote produce record. And when most people have, or at least have access to a smartphone, it shouldn't cost anything to inspect records in town hall or at the courthouse and just take smartphone photos of those documents, saving everybody their time. Simply put, erecting a paywall to public information places an undue financial burden on people to access their government and get the information they need and hold their public servants accountable. I grew up in small town Vermont, mainly Morrisville and Hyde Park with my college years all the way over in Johnson. And I've worked as a journalist for two decades in Vermont, largely in these same communities. And I personally know and have worked with innumerable public servants. I get that they're often overworked and understaffed, and personally I do my best to make sure my public records are casual, polite, and friendly, and I only turn to more formal means when those methods won't suffice. I know that's not the case with everyone. I know that the VL Coffin also proposes that the public records laws be changed to provide, quote, relief from vexatious requests as if those types of requests are the norm instead of the exception, which I think is still more likely. And as the Vermont Journalism Coalition pointed out in its testimony, I think we can all probably think of a handful of folks in our communities who harangue public officials and who might as well cast a fishing net in the town hall to see what they drag out. But I don't think it's wise to change legislation based on a relatively small number of people who make headaches for public officials. Like, I know I know myself and my fellow reporters have annoyed plenty of public officials and our dogged requests for public information too. In nearly two decades of reporting, I've rarely, if ever, been charged a dime for my requests. I think that's partly because of my obvious charming personality, but it's also partly because public officials are seriously by and large helpful civic minded individuals who've already given this stuff out to x number of people last week. So I guess why not me? It's really all all I have to say right now. I don't know how this works, and that's just a testimony or if you guys ask me questions or if I did what I'm supposed to do.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Your instincts are true, sir. It's a little bit of both. So if you have that written down, if you could send that to us, that would be great to our committee assistant, what you just said to your statement.

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: Sure. I'll clean it up a little bit, but yeah.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah. Yeah. Do whatever you gotta do to, like, tighten it up however you want for, you know, us to post on our committee page today. That'd be very, very appreciated. And I know you're on a tight timeline, and we have another guest who's on a tight timeline, so I wanted to afford her like, you know, about fifteen minutes. So that means we have two minutes for Q and A for you, sir. Questions from the table for our guests? Yes, Rob Boyden.

[Rep. Lucy Boyden (Clerk)]: Thank you, Tommy. I'm wondering, you gave a lot of really great examples of typical requests that you all requested folks. Wondering if you could give us maybe an average number of weekly requests.

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: I mean, if it comes you know, when it comes to when I was a reporter, if I had, you know, five stories, I probably had, unless I was just sitting and recording a minute, you know, a meeting or doing a profile, I mean, it was probably, you know, five requests per week, you know, I mean, I mean, there's certain more, you know, in-depth reporting, particularly this time of year, even even simple things like budget proposals, you know, our budget, you know, like we had we have one town that wasn't even it was just dragging its feet on getting us information on departmental budgets after the select board had approved the budget. And they were deferring more to like, you know, their executive summary, their pie charts and all that stuff that they were handing out. What we really wanted, you know, the granular stuff. We wanted to know how much the the departments were were were spending. And then, you know, like like a lot of times, public records are are simple things like like like, you know, the voting tallies or something like that. So, I mean, when it comes to what, you know, public records request, little ones, you know, countless per per per month, per year, larger ones, you know, that we that, you know, when it comes to, you know, requesting things that we know are going to take some time, like criminal investigations are a big one or contract negotiations or internal investigations. It's an understanding that those will take a little time. And so but we we kind of work almost like a juggling act. We get the things that we're we can get immediately to work on what we're working right now, and then we kind of work along with how long it takes us to get the other ones to, you know, to work on stories down the road. We're always kind of working in two different planes.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Anything else from our yes from Joe? No. Thank you very much for your time, sir. I really appreciate your willingness to be here. Congratulations on your first slug of testimony. Well, just like a bitty.

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: Thanks. I'm gonna do it. I'm more comfortable with than go up to the mountain right now.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: No. Good. Good on you. Good on you. No. We had a couple of people in here yesterday at another matter who hadn't testified before. We're, So we're breaking in a lot of the public this week. It feels good to have the participation.

[Tommy Gardner (Editor-in-Chief, Vermont Community Newspaper Group)]: Alright. I'll the training wheels off. Thanks, folks.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Well, careful. Next thing you know, you're gonna have lawn signs. That's how they got me. Alright. Thank you. With that, wow, we nailed the time on that. Next up, we have Kim McManus. How are doing, Kim?

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: I'm fine. How are you?

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I'm fine. Thank you.

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: And I apologize. I have about ten minutes because I need to be in senate judiciary at 09:30. No worries. And I'm happy to come back, though, if we leave any we probably might leave a few loose ends. For the record, my name is Kim McManus. I'm the legislative and policy attorney for the Department of State's Attorneys and Chairs. I am also their records officer, which means I respond to the public records requests for our central office across the street, but also for all 14 state's attorneys' offices. When there's a straightforward public records request, our county offices can handle that on their own, but they will check-in with me. If anything needs to be withheld or redacted, I am moved in, and I'm managing that more complicated workplace. Our most common requests that we receive are often for pending cases, and those get very complicated on the response for that if releasing the information is going to interfere with the investigation or impact the ability to have a fair and impartial trial for the defendant. We get many requests for closed cases. That's much more straightforward. And we get a lot of requests for our communications, communications between attorneys and law enforcement, communications between attorneys, sometimes communications between victims and our office. As you might imagine, there's a lot of sensitive information in our documents and our emails. And so when we receive a request, I appreciate the reporter who was just speaking, that it shouldn't take that much time. It takes a lot of time. Four requests came in last Friday. One of them involves I think the poll was about 100 emails from one request. I need to read all of those emails. I cannot just release them without reviewing them, and that takes a lot of time. The body worn camera and dash camera, when records are requested, involving pieces that we have that information, First, I need to check-in with the agency, creative of those records, to see if they have any exemptions that apply. And then I need to review that camera footage. Each officer sometimes has three different views. Now, once I get the sense of what's going on, I don't have to necessarily view the back of the car or the front of the car. Sometimes I do, depending on what's going on. And that is hours upon hours of footage. One other thing I will point out, our state government computers are not always able to handle the downloading and uploading of these videos. So just a few weeks ago, I had a situation where

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: the

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: county state's attorney's office sent me a zip file of videos to look through. I had to download them onto my computer to view them. My computer crashed multiple times while trying to go through that exercise to be able to view them. So just some pieces of why these things take more time and do the other parts of my job. Records is not the only part of my job, and requesters don't often want to hear that, especially during the legislative session. I don't have eight hours a day, five days a week to be looking through all of these files. So that's just a piece on why this takes time. A few other things I just wanted to mention. My understanding is that you all are exploring public records in general. And so I just wanted to point out a few items for you to consider. One of the areas I mentioned up front is that one of our exemptions is if releasing a record pending a trial would have an impact on the trial, would prevent a defendant from having a fair and impartial trial. There was an entry order in March 2025 in Washington County. And the case is fairly focused because it had to do with arrest materials, which there is an exception to the exception that arrest materials are usually released pretty quickly without any other exception being involved. Those arrest materials were not released right away. And a discussion takes place in the case. And I shared the site with the chair, you all can take a look at it and chat with the legislative council about it. But essentially, the entry order out of Wahgnion County said that we essentially would need to show unequivocally why this would impact a trial. Not that it could, but that it would, the way our statute is written. And that's a very high bar to say precisely why this will impact a trial in three months, six months. So I just wanted to highlight that we're concerned about that. It's an entry order right now. It's only out of one county. But it does concern us a bit from our department because we do not believe that it's appropriate to release almost any records before the disposition of the trial except for the arrest record. Another thing to point out to you all, if you're aware, the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, which regulates law enforcement officers in the state. Once an internal investigation goes to the Criminal Justice Council, by statute, that investigation, all those materials are confidential when they're at the council until the council issues a decision. Right now, folks can public records request a law enforcement agency or a town and ask for that internal investigation. And many are given guidance, and I think it's right under the law that's out there right now, that they need to release that record, even though if you went to the Criminal Justice Council, they cannot release that record. It's the same records. So it's something to look at. Those records are confidential until a decision is made, but you can go back around to the original agency and request the record.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So you're saying CJC has the exception, but the same records can be requested through the municipality or law enforcement at the local level?

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: Correct. That's what we've seen happen a few times. So something to just take a look at if you truly want, as under the VCJC statute, keep those records confidential until a decision is made, then it would be nice to sew that up on VLN and not have that back end. The other piece I mentioned the time that it takes. You've heard that repeatedly. The last thing I wanted to mention is we have been seeing what appear to be computer generated public records requests. And that's just concerning. We need to honor them and reply to them. But again, from a volume standpoint, that just becomes very difficult. I will often email the email that's listed just to ask for clarification. Half the time, I hear back from a human. Half the time, I do not. So that's just something to note. Whether we're going to see more of that or not, I don't know.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So with that, you're presuming it's an AI generated request, but then when you respond, it seems like it's getting a response when you do get one from an entity that seems to be more

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: human. Yes.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: You can tell within yeah, more human.

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: But there's some human behind generation versus just spamming out requests.

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

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: And the last piece, often, from just a big picture statewide resource point of view, if the in our situation, if the agency law enforcement agency involved in the situation is being requested, I'm being requested, maybe the Vermont State Police, if they had a piece in it, are being requested, there's three different records officers running around, pulling around all the same things. And we may not know that for a few days. It's just sometimes there's a real inefficiency built in there that folks should be aware of. And again, big picture, we are state employees. We understand the transparency needs, and usually, our office bends over backwards to comply with that. But there is a real strain on us to respond in the current time limits.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: And I just bird dogged the clock, and you've got four minutes.

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: Yes, to get

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: down Okay, to

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: no, thank you for that. And we'll definitely reach out to you if we decide to want to dig a little bit deeper into your experiences.

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: Wonderful. Thank you so much for discussing this. Yes.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I don't need to ask the question. I think don't it would be fair. So I feel like the answer would be yes. But I do point out that it does not seem to me, based on her testimony, the problem is the requests. It's that they're not people who are obligated to do this aren't being given the resources they need, like additional staff or better technology. Sometimes throwing money at a problem does not work, but it seems like in this case, funding it more appropriately might ease the burden on them and allow them to buy with requests better. That's just something I was thinking about. Yeah, so what she just said.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, that's definitely one of the components that we're hearing is being under resourced and understaffed. That's Yeah. Mr. Martin, how are you?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Great. Hannah's gonna

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: What's that?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Hannah's gonna

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Oh, please, yes, yeah, yeah, please, both of you come up.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, go ahead and go ahead and chair. Oh, you got it?

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: Sorry to make you move furniture.

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Hello. I'm Charles Martin, Deputy Secretary at ANR.

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: I'm Hannah Smith, the General Counsel with the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: So we just wanted to come in to talk a little bit about our agency's experience with public records. I want to be very clear and genuine from the get go. We have no interest in limiting transparency. It's a different conversation, but if I had my way, we might even have more transparency if it meant that our staff obligations could be reduced. So that is not the intent here at all. We disclose everything we can as quickly as possible. But that said, I think the idea that all the, both the majority of these requests are somewhat routine is probably true. I mean, receive hundreds and hundreds of requests, multiple requests a day. Oftentimes they are easy to action. A records custodian at my previous state agency, and we got a lot of business reports, sales reports, requests, things like that that are very routine. Generally pretty easy to action. Requests from the media reporters, again, they're usually pretty narrow because people are on a timeline and they want to have their story printed and generally pretty easy to action. I think where we see a lot more volume and burden on staff and not just records custodian, everyone up to the general counsel for the agency and the secretary or myself searching through records are from well resourced lobbying organizations or individuals who have a right to use the PRA, but from where I'm sitting and are using it, maybe in a way that might align with the contemplated vexatious requests definitions that are being floated around. So some of these, just for purposes perspective, and Hannah will kind of go into some of the more explicit details, take At ANR, we have a lot of organizations who look at our work, petroleum interests, etcetera, well resourced lobbying organizations. Some of these requests have taken up to three or four days of full time work by a senior general counsel just to assemble on behalf of the organizations. And those are pretty broad sometimes for organizations that I think have kind of chosen to demonize the agency and perpetuate sort of a narrative. We'll get very large requests. I think someone said like fishing expedition, we'll get the name of a species and every time we've ever mentioned it, things that are just incredible volumes of records that need to be searched and sipped through. So this can be a huge burden on staff. We don't have any staff member that's specifically full time a records custodian. It's a component of a couple of people's jobs. But I'm sure and I tried to bring this to the committee because I wanted to kind of demonstrate it more specifically, but I'm sure that the contemplated portion of FTEs that we have for this effort does not actually align with the amount of hours we're putting into the effort, nor do those personnel compensation rates align with the potential financial recourse that we can lawfully ask for or request for from the requesters. So the rates are kind of low, and there's also activities that we can't charge for. I know that we're not in here to talk about it, but there's a bill that Representative Lipsky introduced, stage five zero two, that will allow for billable time for physical inspection of documents. I bring that up because we will dedicate if we assemble documents on a laptop and people come in to physically inspect them or a stack of physical papers, we some sort of custodian in that room with those people. So if it takes an eight hour session or two days or something for people to go through all of our records, there's a state employee who's being compensated for those two days to just be in the room with the people examining the records because they're using state equipment in a state office and we have obligations to have some sort of monitoring. So that's not a billable activity. Five zero two contemplates that activity and just invite the committee to check that out if you're all interested. So really, again, just want to emphasize not at all interested in limiting transparency, but what was kind of touched on at the end of the last segment of testimony, I don't think the body of work the obligations under the PRA as it stands right now create a body of work that I think is just not resourced. And I'm not necessarily asking for additional resources. I just want to really make that clear to the legislature that this is not aligning with the availability of our staff to do the actual job. And a product of that is the modernization of things, digitization, some of those automated requests you're hearing about, and I think a lot of organizations who do this kind of full time. I'll hand it over to Hannah to go through all

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: wherever you'd like to go.

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: Sure, thanks. Charles covered a lot of our concerns, but I can illustrate similar to the testimony Attorney McMahon has provided, we get requests that are slightly different. To Charles' point, we're getting requests that are more akin to discovery requests, looking for information rather than documents. And so the one example that Charles mentioned where the agency general counsel, she's done over thirty hours reviewing documents after they've been requested. We're producing responses to requests that involve between 10,012 documents sometimes. And a lot of this is related to the fact that a public record is anything that's produced in the course of the agency's business. So it includes all email correspondents. We do get these requests that are looking for any record that contains a keyword, the name of a species, the phrase climate change. And so just I think that the scope of the response time involved in some of these requests sort of outweighs the available staff time that's contemplated in our records officers' daily work. Which we do the absolute best that we can to move as quickly as possible. But we often have, when we get these very voluminous requests, we have to request additional time beyond the ten days. And it's not because we're trying to delay our response. It's simply because we could dedicate the staff that might be implicated by this request could dedicate their entire day to searching their emails over the requested time period. And it would still take over a week to even go through those emails. The other obligation that Attorney McManus highlighted was the fact that we have a competing obligation to protect records that are exempt. So that does mean that attorneys review. If you have 10,000 documents that you're producing, somebody has to review all of those and make sure that they don't contain information that's confidential or would otherwise violate somebody's right to privacy. In Fish and Wildlife, in particular, we're dealing with both the law enforcement component and sort of the administrative agency component. So typically, I have to reach out then to state's attorneys when records are requested that implicate a case that is ongoing or pending. So there's a lot of, there are layers to this that just, I think, complicate the response time in a way that we're not, it's not an excuse at all. It's just the reality of the situation now that we're dealing with electronic records. We've been making a much more concerted effort to track our time. The agency doesn't charge for any response to records that takes under four hours. So the vast majority of the records requests that the first witness identify, no money is ever being collected in response to those. And we're not

[Unidentified Committee Member]: pedantic about the way that the

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: requests come in. We understand that if someone asks for a record, we have an obligation, even if it's not written in the way that cites to the Public Records Act. To Charles' point about the inspection, that has been sort of a challenging loophole. I think the way that that was written initially was the idea that it would be easier for somebody to come into the office and just look at a physical record. But again, because the majority of our records at this point are electronic, the same amount of staff time goes into compiling them and putting them in a hard drive for somebody to come in and inspect. And we don't recoup any costs for that time spent in production. So I think that that would be potentially a really helpful adjustment to the way that the Public Records Act is written to allow to collect staff time associated with compiling records, even when the requester is then going to come in and inspect rather than us sending them via some issue.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: But you're saying is your experience producing hard copies for inspection and or digital copies is still within the same scope of staff time?

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: It takes the same amount of time.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: One is billable, one isn't.

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: Right. If we produce them via, you know, we use, like, secure email exchanges. We can charge for sound time spent responding. But if they come in to inspect, we technically can't charge for that, even though the same amount of time has been committed to compiling all the electronic.

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: There's aspects of the clock, it's also actually, that are not they're just not time that we're going to track. Like if we do get someone once every time the agency ever mentioned climate change, we will try to narrow that a little bit because it's just such a kind of impossible request. And that might be three or four hours of attorney back and forth trying to come to some consensus with the requester. But that's again not compensated. So it really is just a tremendous amount of staff time. We did only start really dedicating ourselves to some tracking of our minutes than the last year. So we don't have a great representation yet of the full obligation for the agency, but it's a serious obligation.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: The part where you spoke to some of these searches in the larger ones before, like, discovery. Okay. I had a situation by the the first PRR I was subject to in this place was last biennium, it was myself and the previous chair, and it was in and around cannabis policy. And it was a request by newspaper, very high profile newspaper. And I believe it was, you know, we were two individuals who were part of that request, but it was kind of what you were talking about, like, or it was just kind of cannabis in general. And one of the things I was kind of sitting back waiting for is seeing what they would produce article as a result of this. I don't recall ever seeing anything ever actually generated with the massive sweep. Right? And I'm just using that as like a lived example. And I just thought of that off the cuff after you brought up that discovery. Because I have heard from other folks that it feels like there's, especially now with AI, whether it be for the purpose of like research, or for some of the testimony we received was in and around like bids, contracts, and then trying to figure out how to position contracts and bids at a higher rate that the information is now we're just hearing a lot of things from the information is being used in a way where it's not just to divulge through media or individual public and action within government,

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: I guess. And we're blind to the motivations of the requester as kind of a component of PRA. Certainly I can kind of intuit what the information might be used for, but it varies widely from Vermont or to we have individual lobbying organizations that take up to three weeks of agency staff time annually just for their to support their lobbying agenda essentially, which is fully within their rights, but it's just another one of the suite of motivations that we might see.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Would

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: it help if the scope of what the information or what's needed in there or

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Bob, can you speak up a little bit? I can't hear you.

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: Yeah. Would it help if we narrowed parameters of what would be a thousand quests so that you're not looking for key work, you're actually looking for something more specific?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Certainly would reduce the time we spend assembling the record if it's more narrow. But yeah, go ahead and speak

[Kim McManus (Legislative & Policy Attorney; Records Officer, Department of State’s Attorneys & Sheriffs)]: to it. Well, I

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: also think that it would allow us to potentially produce the records that folks are really looking for. I think that we I mean, when we get these really broad requests, we're obligated to produce anything that might be responsive. And I have to believe that a lot of it is not actually responsive, but we don't Again, if the request is narrowed to something more specific, we're able to be more helpful, frankly.

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: For the record, I said phishing, I think is relevant. So what would be different in the way you would look for that information?

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: Well, I think that often

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: What would be ideal maybe in the request parameters?

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: If folks are looking for specific documents, that's always helpful, rather than just records that reference a term. But I also am really hesitant off the cuff to articulate how things should be limited because sometimes Because transparency is the objective here. And so I'm not suggesting that there's no easy way, I think, to limit what can be requested statutorily. But we always try to correspond. I mean, we have an obligation, too, under the statute to correspond with the requester in order to try and better understand what they're requesting, which as Charles mentioned, does take time. But when people are looking for specific documents, when they narrow the time frame, at least, you know, when we get records requests sometimes that are like every record that's been produced since the year 2000. I mean, that in itself requires then somebody who has access to the archived email to go through things like that. I mean, we also our records retention policy doesn't necessarily require retaining all of those records, but some of them, often they are retained. If they're in our possession, we have to go back through decades. So limiting things through the time, through the specific document types that they're requesting, all of those are really helpful for us and allow us to be more efficiently helpful.

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: And I think it would be a mistake if I didn't mention another kind of burden on staff is the way that these come in. And again, not suggesting the committee do any one thing, I want to just raise it. But we'll get requests that say, hey, you're an incompetent moron. Produce these records for me. And that's a completely lawful PRA, right? If there's anything buried in there, that's a coherent request for a document. We honor that. And for the staff that kind of receives this on a daily basis, and that's usually not senior political appointees, it's rank and file staff. It's not a good morale booster. It doesn't get you out of bed in the morning when you're expecting an evasion, all that stuff. I totally believe fully in sort of radical transparency in this space, but that is something that staff experiences on an almost daily basis at the agency.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you would envision working better, because there's so many components of this that are important. But thinking about that this act was, I don't know, was it '70s after Watergate or when we didn't have anything electronically, and balancing the needs of the public for our agencies to do the work that we need them to do versus chasing down records. Do you have thoughts about that could be reconstituted in the current digital world?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: I think a good start would be to examine the intent of H502, which that's a good area to I'll probably regret framing it this way, but I think if you're going to obligate the agency to eighteen hours of sitting in a room with you, for instance, I think your interest in doing that is probably a little bit greater if there's no financial obligation to you for that time that that public person's salary was paid to them during those two days. So I think looking at what is billable is maybe an area to discourage people from this massive unending quests. Again, that works both ways because I don't want under resourced people who just want good records to be limited or hesitant to request them. But oftentimes when it's that person in a room for eight hours, sort it's of an individual Vermonter seeking records. It's usually a well resourced organization with some attorneys, but we're still doing it for free as a state, which I think should be something the legislature contemplates.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So this is something that pops into my head from a previous test. And this was at the municipal level. With the billable requests that you have, do you have open invoices? Do people not collect? Do you have the unpaid invoices that wind up hanging out? Because we did hear that to be this level that they'll generate the the request and then no one will pick up the order of the payment.

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Curious if that's I'm sure recouping payment problems have occurred, but

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: It can take time. We haven't run up against any refusal to pay. I think sometimes it takes repeated reminders. And again, most of the requests that we can fulfill, we can fulfill in under four hours. So we're not issuing an invoice for those. I'm not aware of any instances where you've actually we always inform folks, you can challenge any of these to the Secretary's office. I'm not aware of an instance where somebody has flat out refused to pay after they've received the records. Just to be clear, we are producing the records and then we're sending an invoice. So they could. And our recourse is pretty limited. I I think that we can, if the same requester is coming in repeatedly but not paying anything, we can eventually, we would say, we need to be able to recoup some of these costs pursuant to the Secretary of State's schedule of charges before we can respond to more records requests. We haven't come to that point yet.

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: But

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: it is administrative time that's also spent producing those invoices and following up, just to note that.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, yeah. There's the labor built into the process.

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: And just for context, the schedule of charges that the Secretary of State's office is often half the rate of the people doing this work. So you think of it as like balancing the budget from that perspective. You're kind of receiving a fee that covers less than half of the personnel time to do the thing.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Understood. So yes, so the amount that you're the billable per hour does not match the actual personnel, the labor cost that those people are looking for that labor.

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: Well, I'm sympathetic to that, having worked for the state for a long time. The person that's going through files and printing them out and blah blah blah has another job to do that you're not doing, so the fusion rolls out to other citizens who are not getting their stuff done. Is happening. Also, you said we're not going to give you any more records until you pay us, the court wouldn't slap your hand pretty quickly.

[Hannah Smith (General Counsel, VT Dept. of Fish & Wildlife)]: I'm sure we would get smacked.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I missed that last part, but the last part where the business about

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: we can't do the records until they build work with probably slap their hands.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yeah, that doesn't. Let's see what we got going here. Any more questions for our guests right now? We have some ample amount of time to our next testimony, but I do have a meeting in about twenty minutes that popped up. But do we have anything else for our guests from the Agency of Natural Resources Fish and Wildlife?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: We're happy to come back whenever it is ready, just let us know.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Okay. Yes. I know you said that you are not making a budget request, so I want to be very clear that I understood that. But just hypothetically, if you had more staff to do this work and more support for technology and people to do it, would that ease the burden?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Yeah, I think I could speak for all of state government and say that this activity is not resourced to reality. So I'll just leave it there. Guess I don't want to. But yes, more resources would definitely ease the burden of not requesting more resources. That's a factual statement.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I know that there are like particulars for every agency department, like what the specifics are about, what your processing of those records look like. But can you even can you envision a way in which there was like a a dedicated staff to public records requests that fulfilled requests for a variety of departments? Or is it so specific what you're doing that it really needs to be someone in your your agency?

[Charles Martin (Deputy Secretary, Agency of Natural Resources)]: Think the considerations change. If you're primarily a law enforcement or court oriented agency, you might have a different set of things that your records custodians are familiar with. I think you're talking kind of a central state repository for records. I don't know that I want to comment too heavily in there. Looks like an ADS, some attorneys might want to go into that. But it would have to be a pretty knowledgeable set of custodians who had some fluency in everybody's business if they're going be able to successfully do that.

[Rep. Robert "Bob" Hooper (Member)]: All

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: right, any other questions Chargas? Thank you. And we'll be back in the block of times here, we can get some work done on the other bills we're working on and work on lining up testimony for the other things we're speaking to this week and early next week. So, we're going to go off now and come back at 10:35 for six eighty six and acts relating to expanding, identification of certain blogging advertisements. Stay tuned, folks.