Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Alright. We are live. Alright. Good morning, everyone. It is about ten after ten on Thursday, March 19. First order of business and only order of business on this morning's agenda is an introduction walk through and some witness testimony on s two five five, an act relating to a step act relating to establishing a pilot law enforcement governance council in Wyndham County. We are gonna open up with senator Harrison. Good morning.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District)]: Morning. Thank you for having me. So, I'm Wendy Harrison. I represent the Wyndham District, which is most of Wyndham County.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: And I'm

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District)]: the sponsor of this bill. And I want to first just describe a little bit about Wyndham County and then talk about how Wyndham County is likely similar to your counties. So our county is more rural than you would expect. We found out when I was on the school redistricting task force, and we did a lot of mapping and found out that the region of Wyndham County is more similar to the Northeast Kingdom than it is to other counties, which I was really surprised. And if you jet by on 91, you don't really see that. But what's in the interior are a lot of rivers, a lot of mountains, and it's challenging to get from place to place. And so it's a really good place to start a program like this, and it shows the need for a program like this. So we have four towns and city or towns and one village who have police departments, only four out of the entire county. And they're on the edges of the county. And historically, the state police would be able to respond to law enforcement needs. They haven't been able to, in the last few years, at the same level. So, something that's similar to your towns is that sheriff contracts for services, contracts with individual municipalities. That gets complicated pretty fast, especially when he has tried, and he'll talk to you more about this, to coordinate the agreements, because it's very challenging to administer 17 different agreements, which are all annual agreements. So, the structure of the service is changing all the time. And so, that led the sheriff to talk to all of the municipalities. And this program is something that the towns want. The towns who don't have service are supportive, and the towns who already have police departments are generally supportive. It's completely voluntary. What a town would do would be, if they want to be part of this, they will be part of a new board that would be set up, and the board would have the authority to set the level of service and monitor the level of service. And something very different in this is that the funding mechanism would be county tax. So, the side judges would put in a number, an amount, only on the towns who have the service. That's how they would pay for it. And again, it's completely voluntary, which I think is a really important part of this. And it fulfills a need, and it seems very logical and necessary at this time.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: Okay.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Yes, representing.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: I might have

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: missed it. Thank you, Senator. Are all the towns now covered by the Vermont State Police? Depends on what you mean by covered.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District)]: Technically, I mean, the whole state is covered by that. But there are, they don't respond to every item. And they used to respond. We have some areas that are kind of on the fringe of the populated area where they were regularly called and they would show up within half an hour, an hour. And now they just don't show up.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: So we have a similar situation in Franklin County as well, that some of that in my district, really far outlying towns, it's hard to get somebody there. Right, which is really alarmistically because our barracks covers Grand Isle and Franklin County. So they could be all the way in South Hero and be needed in Richford, which are on opposite sides of these two counties. What about sheriff's coverage? Do all the towns currently contract with sheriff or not?

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District)]: No, but you

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: should talk to the sheriff about that. Thanks. Same situation. Thank you. Thank you.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Any other questions for the senator? Thank you kindly.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Windham District)]: Thank thank you for taking this up and

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: for Absolutely. Having

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: up next, council. Let's talk about words on a page.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: Morning committee members. For the record, my name is Tim Dublin, legislative counsel. We have two documents available to you online. We have the as passed by this version of s two fifty five, as well as an overview. The overview is somewhat dated, is, the contents of which is perfectly relevant and accurate. It does state that this is, an overview created for as amended by the Senate Committee, but that's all the all the information contained therein is accurate. I'll just update that at a later point. So, chair Byron, would you like me to work off the overview and be brief or do more

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: First, I wanna do more of a jaunt through this and then talk to the rest

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: of the list. Okay. Happy to. So, just a few introductory notes. This bill creates a pilot program in the Wyndham County Law Enforcement Government Council Council throughout the memo here, and this will provide orchestrated law enforcement and related services to participating towns within Wyndham County through the year 2033. The specific services are determined by the council and provided by the Wyndham County Sheriff's Department and funding for this venture is through a special assessment on member municipalities that is in proportion to the population of each member's town. The bill is session law, so this is not going to be codified anywhere and that's because of its nature as a pilot that will expire or sunset relatively soon. And I should just note that some statutes are not withstood, and I'll point that out later. And then we just in that third bullet, I have a mention of the two minor changes that the senate government operations committee made, via amendment, which are now adopted in the bill. So section one just sets out a few different definitions for various terms that come with the bill. Section two has to do with the authorization and establishment of the program, and this will authorize the creation of the council for the purpose of providing regional law enforcement and related services during the pilot period. The council may begin operations and taxation on either 07/01/2026 or the date on which five or more member municipalities are voted to become member municipalities, whichever first date of birth. Yes, representative.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Just a quick clarification. So if four towns, four municipalities want to do this, this council cannot convene? Correct. Thanks. Section three has to do with membership, really how

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: municipalities enter and exit the pilot council. And let's see, this will section enables municipalities in Windham County to join and exit by vote of the town's legislative. Each member of municipality shall have one representative with one vote on the council. Council representatives shall have shall be a serving select board member of that municipality and will be selected by the municipality select board. Section four has to do with the governance of the council and particularly the governance structure, powers, duties. The council will meet at least quarterly and at such other times as necessary, and all meetings shall be warned and conducted in accordance with the Vermont Opus City Law. Counsel shall have the powers and duties to, one, adopt bylaws for the operation of the council, two, determine the annual budget for law enforcement and related services to be provided to member municipalities. Three, establish the level and scope of services to be delivered to member municipalities. Four, develop standards and performance metrics for delivery, sorry, for delivered law enforcement and related services five, monitor service delivery and evaluate program effectiveness six, submit the approved budget to the Wyndham County Assistant Judges for inclusion in the county budget and seven, enter into agreements as necessary for the proficient services. Next, turn to section five. This is where the budgeting and finance aspects of the bill resides, and this details fiscal elements of council. The council prepares annual budget to submit to the Wyndham County System Judges who include it in see, as a separate item in a larger county budget. County treasurer then levies and collects a special assessment on member municipalities in proportion to each municipality's population. Non member municipalities shall not be assessed or charged for council services, and the council's finances will be audited annually. Financial reports will be provided quarterly to member municipalities and the assistant judges. Section six having to do with service delivery. And this will lay out the parameters for which the sheriff's department in county will provide law enforcement related services to those member municipalities. These specific services are determined by the council and guaranteed between the parties, that is department and member news, founders are really counsel here, by an annual contract. And that contract must specify, one, the types and levels of services to be provided, two, the standards and performance metrics for delivered and services. Three, reporting requirements. And four, allocation of resources among member municipalities. And these services, provided by the William Sheriff will be coordinated with state law enforcement agencies, existing member and non member of municipal law enforcement agencies, and emergency services to ensure efficient resource utilization. Section seven, reporting and evaluation. And this directs the council to provide periodic reports as well as a final report. So beginning in 2027, the council will report to this committee and its sister committee in the Senate as well as the Wyndham County legislative delegation and member municipalities. And that annual report will require, let's see, one, financial statements for preceding fiscal year, two, service delivery statistics and performance metrics, three, member municipality participation and satisfaction levels, four, challenges encountered and lessons learned, and five, recommendations for improvement. And then a final report will be submitted by the council to the same entities on 12/31/2033, and that shall include an assessment of cost effectiveness compared to alternative service delivery models, an analysis of service quality improvements, evaluation of the governance model's effectiveness, recommendations regarding continuation, modification, or expansion of the program, and finally, a proposed framework for statewide replication warranted. Section eight has to do with the limitations and protections. It explicitly preserves the rights of non member municipalities, which will not be assessed any costs related to their council operations, but will, sorry, and those non member municipalities will continue to receive state lease services as currently provided, and the non member municipalities do retain all rights to establish their own local law enforcement agencies or contract for law enforcement services independently. This section also makes clear that the bill will not affect constitutional or statutory duties of the Lyndon County Sheriff's Department or Sheriff's Law. It will not alter state police responsibilities or coverage, and will not impact existing law enforcement agencies or modify existing mutual aid agreements. Section nine of the bill has to do with sunset or termination of the council, and this council will sunset on 06/30/2034, or in the event of the number of member municipalities being reduced to one, whichever occurs first. And then there's kind of some wind down procedures associated with that, really being at the time of termination, Any remaining funds shall be returned proportionally by population to current and prior member municipalities that were members during the current fiscal year. Section 10 has to do with conforming amendments, and this clarifies that the assistant judges in Wyndham County are authorized to levy differential tax rates on member and non member municipalities regardless of any provision in title 24, chapter five, particular to those county officers. And section 11 has to do with effective dates and this date, well, bill takes effect upon passage. And happy to drill down into a specific language of who you want. We're just

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: gonna put an opinion for now or answering general questions. I think that first thing that grabbed my eye was the, nothing herein shall in the subsections after this. The section eight limitations and protection? Yeah. Yeah. Just seeing sort of guardrail language like that is I'm just going back into my memory bank. I mean, I like what it's doing there, but it's that practice applied in other, like, programs? Just more of a curiosity. Sure.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: Typically, don't necessarily include explicit limitations or protections because if the law is silent, then it's not going to apply. It's kind of usually self evident. This is a measure of, I would describe it as explicit clarification.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Explicit clarification.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Vernacular of the day. No.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: And I just wanted to speak to that as a curiosity, as

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I said, because I like what it's doing. It was just sort of a it jumped out to it as a little unique. So anything else from Mr. Deborah or at all?

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Is there anything in here, Tim, about if a municipality does decide to leave governance model, how much notice they have to give to do that? That's a good question.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: There's something regarding the notice requirements for leaving. It's a vote that is by the legislative body of the municipality. That would have to be warrant. And then there are some leaving I think there's a drag on the leaving time for where is it here? Essentially saying that you're kind of on the hook financially for the next, the duration of that fiscal year.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Okay, so I would assume it would come like at the end of a contract period. But if some extenuating circumstance happened and the legislative body wanted to pull out of the agreement, I'm not sure how that would work. So, just thinking of worst case scenarios here. Something to think about.

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

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Just trying to understand, or make sure I understand the council and the authority versus the members and what exactly that entails. Is it policy governance also, or is it more just a financial relationship?

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: It is both. So the determination of what the services will constitute, I would consider that policy. And they are financially obligated once they sign on to it. There will be, some let's see, when we have the hours and duties, let's see, where are we on the bill here? My outline. So sorry. This is under section four of governance. And so we have adopting bylaws for the operation of the council itself, the policy, determination of the annual budget to provide for those law enforcement and related services. That's both, establishing the level and scope of services to be delivered to member municipalities policy. Again, developing standards and performance metrics for the delivered services policy, monitoring service delivery and evaluate program effectiveness policy, and submitting, see, the approved budget in both and then entering two agreements necessary, that's the contracting portion of this mechanism, perhaps both. So there's some internal governance, there's, I would say most of the policy is really, framed around determining what those law enforcement, services point out and then tracking their provision success.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It's not like direct authority over those law enforcement agencies if they have a

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: separate entity, but it's part No, of the

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: there's expected coordination between them for sake of effectiveness, but this will not be reaching into a local law enforcement agency.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Rutland? Yeah. Going back to section three membership.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: Yes.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: On one, the line 11. Mhmm. So having one representative with going through the municipality serving, says the representative shall be the serving select board member.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: Yes.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: And I'm wondering if there was any discussion taken up if because I know in other laws, we have things that may be or may be appointed by the select board because the town manager is not, at least Montana is not part of the select board, but if the select board didn't have a person that they felt qualified to be on this, but the town manager was, could they appoint them? Or does it have to be? Because it right here it says it has to be a select board member and that may, just in my thoughts, deter some towns from trying this for the sake that maybe the select board member doesn't have the time to be on this council, but they wanna appoint their town manager to it who reports back to the select board, or do they have to make ready votes on the spot? That's what I'm wondering. So I'm just I'm just curious about the way why it was phrased that way.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: As to why or the intent behind it, I have to defer sponsor for the bill. And I would, probably also point you to the reporter of the bill as to the testimony taken and stuff Seneca Bob's. But you're right. It is prescriptive. It is limiting to just those ex officio. So the the members of the select four.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Yeah, was just curious about that language. That's fine. Okay.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: Anything else for council?

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: Okay,

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: thank you, sir. We'll certainly have you in here more to do.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: Just quickly to follow-up on representative Hango's point about leaving. So we have in section three, subsection c, a member of municipality may withdraw from this council by majority vote of the legislative body of the municipality. With such withdrawal, come in effective at the end of the next fiscal year the phone. So it wouldn't be an immediate

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: withdrawal. Alright. And we are still waiting on Kim. So I'm gonna shuffle this up. I'm gonna

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: go over share of answer session.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Come on up. Good to see you. It's been a while since we had you in

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: the hot seat. Well, you, Mr. Chair. I haven't done this long. I actually have missed this committee. That's good news. I like your room better, though. I have to admit, the last time I was before this committee, Room 10 is a beautiful room, but this is a far better location for houseguidance.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I don't like it.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: Table is yours, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Members of the Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs, my name is Mark Anderson. I am the sheriff of Wyndham County. Several

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: of

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: you have testified before, so I am not here in my capacity because I'm no longer in the capacity. I'm not here for the Sheriff's Association. I am now here as the Wyndham County Sheriff. I am the past president, which we've transferred that role over to Sheriff Harlow. So if you do have sheriff's issues broadly, she is the person to talk to. But I am so excited to be here for this bill. I'm gonna start off with a few things that I have heard about this bill. First off, it's a good bill. Think I you need to know where I stand on it, so it's a good bill. We really like it. The second thing, it's not a new tax. People are concerned about property taxes. It's not new. In fact, what we're looking to do is replace existing funding with a different mechanism. You've often heard me talk about, we might not agree on the way to get to a location, but we all agree on the location we want to get to. So, I'm finding a different path from an existing system, and that's what this bill is about. I have formally worked on this project for about three years with the Townsend Windham County, both with police departments and those without police departments. I have been working on this my entire career, whether I knew it or not. And so, the beauty of this bill is that it is designed to not solve the problem. It's designed to solve what are the questions of the problem we're trying to solve so we can come back in the future, which is why it was introduced as a pilot project in Windham County. I can look at every county through Vermont and say, these are ways we can talk about this. We've talked about some of these issues through the years with this committee and other committees to start working on the various issues. So, those can be about accessing law enforcement, accessing services when your agency of choice is no longer rendering them for whatever those reasons are. I'm not here to get into the issues of solving all of the problems, but what we did through this work with our towns, select boards, our town managers, and town administrators, let's try to figure out what were the issues we can collectively work on. So three years ago, we started bringing the stakeholders together to say, how do we solve the problem? I started with the problem statement that was informally, access to policing in Vermont sucks. I have a more refined version of that now, which is to say, access to law enforcement in rural Vermont towns lacks consistency or equity. So, what are we trying to do is solve that problem. The issue at hand is that there is really no mechanism between the state who currently owns, under Title XX owns, the promotion of public safety in the state of Vermont and the function of search and rescue, and that's primarily conducted through the Vermont State Police. But that is as clear as the statute will be, it's to promote public safety, nor to the towns who are enabled, but not required to have law enforcement. The sheriff is a constitutional office, which beyond the establishment and the constitution, centuries worth of case law, including common law that came over from England, The sheriff is kind of this nebulous area that is, as it's defined in Vermont statute, of what do we do? Vermont law says the sheriff shall serve civil process. So if you don't pay your credit card, if you don't pay your mortgage, we serve the papers for the court. We're obligated to transport prisoners who have been arraigned for a crime to and from the prisoner I'm sorry, the correctional system, the jails. And then, we are also obligated to assist parties in a relief from abuse order to get their property back, if the court orders it. Then there's this other very curious section of law that says, and the sheriff can contract with public or non public entities to do all the things that the sheriff does. And it's about that broad. So, we've used that quite a bit, and about 75 to 80% of my operations rely on that section, and so about 25% are the Uchelles. In my county, that is a different problem to solve than it is in Chittenden County, than it is in Franklin County, than it is Bennington County and Windsor County. Each county is different. So, I can't even come in with a cookie cutter that says we can stamp this across the state of Vermont and make it work to solve the problem in Vermont, which is a lack of access or consistency in law enforcement throughout the state. As we start to boil down what is the problem, it really comes down to two simple things. Maybe, well, simple to identify. How do we govern? And how do we fund? Funding follows governance. Issues that towns are currently dealing with, they lack capacity, they lack money, taxes are too high, they rely on certain things. And as I start to go through the whole list, and you've heard this list before, as I go through the whole list, we start to identify what I call third rails. So, the goal of this is to not step on the third rail. This problem has been studied for nearly sixty years. It's been identified for nearly seventy to eighty. The first study was in 1967. This problem has been attempted two other times, one in the 80s. At that time, it was by then Windsor County State's Attorney. I'm blanking his name at the moment. He used to be the Attorney General for the State of Jeff Hamsway, thank you. He used to be the Attorney General for the State of Vermont and the Chief Justice. He worked on this when he was working. I called him about this very project, and the promise I had to make to him to tell him, have him tell me what the problems he had with his project were, I had to tell the next kid thirty years down the road, when they call me asking about how to solve this problem. So, there is a bit of cynicism in that statement because we have been working on it this long. But at the same point, it was also attempted again in the 90s by then Wyndham County Sheriff Bill Graham and Bradborough Police Chief Bruce Campbell, thank you, Bells Falls Police Chief, Paco Amin. Fewer things culminated for it to fail then, but at the same time, it was Bruce Campbell's death, he had a heart attack and passed away, and that kind of took the initiative away from the project. And there it sat. So, I picked up the man. What are we doing? We're leapfrogging the third rails. We found a way to talk to the towns and say, we acknowledge the discussions around should we or should we not have counties? Should we or should we not have voter input on taxes? Should we or should we not talk about how governments work with each other to share things? And how did we do that? Things like floods. It brought us together to say, we're all kind of in this problem together, even if we come from different places and different beliefs. So, what are we trying to do in this project? In a very limited way. Geographically limited, time limited, and even service limited. We are trying to solve the problem that has existed for a long time. And we're trying to do it by using existing funds on contracts that my towns currently pay to my department to pay for a service, that instead of separating it into 19, well, I guess technically 17 silos, we put it into one silo that is inclusive of all of them, and then give everyone a voice. Give them the choice, give them voter representation, give them representation from elected officials on behalf of voters, to have some form of efficiency and some form of functionality. So, this bill is not designed to solve all the problems. In fact, when you read it, it's kind of cool legislation, because it's actually trusting this governing body to solve or answer some of the questions. And that's why we want it to be timed out. We want to come back to the legislature and say, we never anticipated this problem, and here we are, and we want to be able to solve it ourselves. And if we got it wrong, we can fix it. But we're gonna tell you about it. So, this is not my department's first crack at a pilot project. In fact, we've done quite a few different pilot projects on the thing. And this bill, the thing is doing law enforcement. But what we're trying to do is provide good information. Because this has been well studied, because the legislature, private think tanks, the executive branch have performed studies for so many years, we actually have a lot of the questions we need to answer that we can pull out of that. But as I start to bring it down to our level, at the end of the day, the list I just gave you, how do we work through some of those third rails are some of things we need to talk about. My goal through this bill is to bring together a collective group of people to say, we agree on how to do this thing so that we can solve our problem collectively. Towns don't have the money to do this themselves. Police departments are incredibly expensive. The state police don't have the resources to do this broadly at the level towns are expecting these days. Our barracks oh, actually, I'm gonna start to answer some of the questions that I heard asked before. So our barracks is the Westminster Barracks. They cover two counties, Wyndham and Windsor Counties. If they are fully staffed, they have five troopers per shift to cover that area. That's roughly 1,500 square miles per five people. If they are not fully staffed, I'll defer to the state police to talk about what that coverage looks like and how that works. But the point is, it's a big area for not a lot. In Wyndham County, my department contracts with 15 out of the 23 towns. There are three towns that have police departments. There's one village that has a police department. And so, the 23 towns, 15 are with me. Four I'm sorry, three towns have their own police departments and the rest rely on the state police. Our population is roughly 45,000 people, the town of Brattleboro is 12,000. When we collect all the people, the towns that contract with me represent roughly half the county, 22,000 people roughly. So, what are we trying to do is leverage existing law, existing funding mechanisms around things that people understand, things that people recognize are the issues, but can be solved later, to basically build out how do we work together. My department raises just under three quarters of million dollars to provide policing to the towns that we provide it to. This is done through that section of law that I said the sheriff can contract to do all the other things that are sheriff. So we're doing that to provide law enforcement, to provide regional dispatch, provide regional animal control. The problem with the contract, both sides have to agree. So if I come to a town and say, I don't agree with what you want, I know. If the town says, we want you to provide 20 fourseven policing and we're going to do it for $100 a year, I know. So, how do we start to reach reasonable expectations of what we can or cannot do? And so, that's why we come back to this conversation. So right now, in Wyndham County, the three towns who have a full time police department do not receive direct services from the state police. The state police are accessible to those agencies if they needed help, say a homicide occurs. But generally speaking, is that town police department that assists or provides the services to the town. The remaining 15 towns in my county contract with me, and so we provide what we call supplemental policing service. That is in addition to what the state police provide, but it basically is to fill the gap of what they're missing. If you call 911 on any one of those towns, you will get the state police. If my deputy is on duty, they will respond. So we have that relationship with the state police to do that. A lot of this work was built off of towns approaching us, asking us to help with animal control. The town clerks often are struggling with registering dogs, town administrators or town managers are struggling with what happens when somebody's dog bites someone else, or the dog is running down the road, or whatever it may be. Animal Control is the place that towns are obligated under Title 24 to provide a service related to the registration of dogs. And we can talk about other domesticated animals, I'll keep it simple. We said, I can do the thing, but towns, number one, have access to the funding. I call it the revenue, the income. They have access to the ordinances. We stopped providing animal control in Wyndham County. The sheriff's office stopped doing the service, because towns had ordinances from the nineteen seventies that were considered to be illegal. We did not wanna get sued. So we stopped doing it. Towns would not update their ordinances. Towns started approaching us again saying, will you please concern? We said, if you will update your ordinances and work with the league of cities and towns, we will do this. And they did because they wanted the service. So we worked to update town ordinances with the support of VL Coffin, with the support of the towns, and we said, we'll provide this service in these ways that help all of you. The problem I have right now that grew from four towns to 10, if I have one town say, I don't like this, I'm out. Which we had happened. What do the other towns do? And so, can watch a regional service that's built on the contract model with 10 separate contracts, one with each town to my agency, implode. I'm not here to criticize any of the other times we have seen this happen, but it has happened. And so, is one example where the concern is that if a town were to make a decision in its best interest, and they decide to do something, how does it affect all the neighbors when we share the service? We had this occur with EMS consolidation project. Again, I'm not here to weigh in on whether it was the right thing or the wrong thing for the town. What I'm here to say is that the one town that said we want to do our own EMS provision of service, that affected the discussion of about 15 to 18 towns on how do they or do they not get an ambulance to a property in their town, and can they even afford to do that? It's a problem. I can't solve that problem because I don't fully understand the EMS system, which is also why we said we have had the discussion around policing. We want to keep this limited to the policing service because towns get that problem and they currently do not have it. They want public safety. They do not want to wait an hour for someone to show up or to get a phone call saying, we're not coming, file with your insurance company. They're tired of that. I don't want to see vigilantes. They're doing that. So this is why we're working on the project. Another time the same thing imploded through this shared regional model, I'm currently using as a contract model is around waste management. And a town said, we want to exit, this is no longer beneficial to our constituents. And so they did. And it had rippling effects throughout all the other towns. So we see this model where towns can opt in, opt out being problematic, but for the purposes of this pilot project, we'll acknowledge as what I'm going to continue to refer to as a third rail to say, I can't solve that, but at least in a time limited project like this one, if it blows up, we can come back and talk to legislature about why it blew up and we can acknowledge it, just like I can acknowledge the one town that left my regional animal control room. I'm happy to answer questions. I can talk about this for about two days. I have 500 pages worth of documents I could share with you. I sent to any assistant a two page document that tries to I'm with you, Mr. Chair. A two page document that should be on your website. But like seriously, there's a lot to this. But most of it just boils down to things you have already seen through discussions around education, around flooding, around public safety, around EMS, around town charters. Like This committee works on it. It's why I say it's my favorite committee in the building. You do everything. And these are all the same problems that every committee is dealing with, but your committee gets to see the common thread of all of this. So, I'm not here to butter you up saying this is my favorite committee, but it truly is because it's the committee of all the things, and we're working on all the things.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: What are writing? We actually did every bit, roughly around that once.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Rev Boyd, nice high end.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: Thank you. Apologies if Senator Harrison mentioned this, but I'm wondering if there's been outreach to all the Wyndham County municipalities, their willingness to participate in, any concerns, or just feedback.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: Yeah, so our process was an invitation to all the towns in Wyndham County without a police department, so that technically it's 20. The town of Rockingham has the village Bells Falls that has its own police department, it's an interesting nuance because they only patrol the village. So I contract with the town. So I'm technically ruling the town of Rockingham out when I say there's four towns with police departments, but really it's three towns, one village. And I contract with the town of Rockingham to cover everything that's not the village. Anyways, so we reached out to all the towns without police departments to say, how do we work together? That was three years ago. We've had numerous meetings with all the towns to say, how do we work together? And ultimately, we got to the this bill. The towns with police departments, reached out to say, we're not trying to solve your problem. There are problems to solve, don't get me wrong. We're not trying to solve their problem, which is going back to access to law enforcement services. They haven't. There are other things we could come back and talk about, but we're trying to raise the water of the towns that have no services to be at least semi equitable to what the towns with police departments have. So of the 19 towns without police departments, 17 are supportive of the project. This is before money's on the table. We know that that will be a discussion, which is why we build in this. If we can get five towns to sign on, we're gonna push. If we can't, we tried, it fell apart for reasons that we'll come back and talk about anyways, because I'll continue to try to change it. I started this initiative with the question of, what do you want me to do? Was a simple problem.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So I wanna be conscious of a a time constraint with Kim. She's gonna be somewhere in, eight minutes. So, why don't we go to Kim real quick,

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: if that's okay? Happy to.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: If you can shift over to Thank you. Yeah, no problem. No problem. I just know she's on a on a tight clock. Hi, Kim.

[Kim McManus (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Hello, and I apologize. I should have been there at 9AM as planned, but I my schedule forgot, basically. Good morning, Good

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: morning. Good morning. No. The the room is yours. Go go ahead.

[Kim McManus (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Thank you. My name is Kim McManus. I'm with the Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs. We appreciate being asked in on this bill on the Senate side, essentially the question was, how would this working group, this idea impact the Department of States Attorneys and Sheriffs? And simply put, it does not impact our department. As Sheriff Anderson was explaining, the individual sheriff's departments are allowed to contract out as they like. The department, we have our direct line with the sheriff, so to speak, is and our state transport deputies would not be involved in the policing that Sheriff Anderson would be looking at with this regional approach. So simply put, we think it's an interesting idea. We'd love to see how it plays out, but it would not impact our department's operations in any way.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So any questions for Kim while we a great ninety second synopsis. Yeah. Anything for Kim? No? Alright. Thank you so much. Don't worry about the calendar thing. Just a day in the life. We will talk to you soon.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Appreciate it. Yes. Sheriff Anderson, do you wanna come back up? And just pick up where you left off. That's all we got at hand.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault (Member, Dorset)]: How is this any different

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: than what the town of Dorset does with the county, Bennington County?

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: I have no idea how the town of Dorset does anything with Bennington County.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: We have a contract with the Bennington Sheriffs, so many hours per the coverage or whatever, that they're our police department. So, because, you know, counts as our own police department.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: So, as it currently stands, I contract with 15 towns. I have the town of Athens, which is a population of roughly 400 people. I have the town of Putney, a population of roughly 2,800 people. Athens contracts for $5,000 a year, which provides approximately an hour of service a week. A hundred and sixty eight hours a week, do the math. Town of Putney contracts for forty hours a week. So considerably more investment. The problem is if I have a deputy who's more likely to be in the town of Putney, when a problem occurs in the town of Athens It's a long ways. It's not just just the distance factor, which is a factor. But then it's also the other issue of I have a business relationship with the town to provision a service. So if I say it's in my business interest on the contract side of this to say, they're gonna stay in Putney, otherwise, I will have to write the town of Putney a check. It's better for me to keep the person there even though the person needs help. So it's kinda dumb when we talk about public service and public safety to say, well, no, the business side of me is saying don't get sued. But that's what we're basically compelled to do under Title 24. So, how does it work? It tries to say, let's create equity and saying everyone's going to contribute to the pot and my relationship financially is going to be with the governance council to determine how do we provide the service. So, we're trying to basically, to simplify the conversation, we're trying to say, let me contract with one entity as opposed to 15. And that's how we're trying to say, let's deal with it.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Our borders Evans.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: All right, so I live in Charlotte and we do not have police. We can't we've over the years, we've contracted with state police to provide policing sheriff. We're currently with the Chittenden County Sheriff right now. I think. I'm wondering if you I'm just thinking about all the problems that we run into as a municipality with with these kinds of things, I think we have thirty two hours a month of of service with them, which isn't that much. So I know that you probably don't know the specifics of this contract, but in general, like if if a town, a municipality has a contract with the sheriff's office and let's say there's like a car accident or something or 12 people getting caught for speeding within, you know, at the same time, and then you spend eight hours dealing with that situation. Does that mean you're done for the week if it all happened on that one day? Like, is that how it works?

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: Some of the contracts, I'll use the town of Athens as an example. Again, It's one hour a week. So a burglar investigation, I could spend forty hours on. Right. We will burn the whole contract, the entire value of the contract, in two investigations. And so then we have a discussion with the person saying, my house was just broken into to say, it's better for your town if you call the state police and the person who had their house broken into is not gonna be liking that conversation. But I am still obligated to pay for the deputy, pay their health insurance or retirement, like all the benefits, I have to pay for the car, the radio system, the law enforcement liability insurances, all of the training. Like all of these things very quickly become very expensive when we start talking about it, which is why towns municipalities having a police department is hard. So, to answer your question, do we just kind of throw our hands up in the air and say, Contract's done? Not really. Because we're still human and saying, You need help and we're going to help you, if it's a life or limb type problem. So, we figure out the money later all the time on those types of issues. But when your house is broken into, there's nobody there, and whether it was broken into six hours ago or six months ago, it's the same safety risk. And so, really, at the end of the day, we'll say, you should contact the state police, we'll save you money, which then becomes a provisioning of need onto the state police, whether they have the people or the ability or not. So, we're trying to balance that part out. The other thing, I forgot to mention this, counties currently cannot raise funds for law enforcement. There's a Supreme Court opinion called Stowe v. Lamoille from the 70s, I want say it was '77, which specifically says the County cannot raise funds unless the legislature has prescribed them the authority to do that. So, to that point, the law is silent. It does not prescribe that currently. And so, what we're asking in this pilot project is a temporary provision of that ability to be able to do the thing that then takes away all of these awkward conversations my department is forced to have with people saying, Why didn't my town contract with you? You

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: should talk to

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: your select board model citizen.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So there's no stat I'm sorry.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: No, no, no. Keep that.

[Tim Dublin, Legislative Counsel]: There's no governing statute to that, but there is a case precedent.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Old desire.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: I won't comment on how old you are, Mr. Chair.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: 77.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: So, the County Of Lamoille on the basis that the County Of Lamoille wanted to have a police force in a county lockup. And the Supreme Court in Vermont ruled that the function of the County lockup had been transferred to the state as part of the state correctional regional correctional system, in which we now know is the Department of Corrections, and there's no statement for providing policing. There is contemplation that the state or the town do this, and because county governments are limited in the state of Vermont, there's no provisioning or expectation by the legislature to require or permit the county to do this.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Evans, then Hango. Sorry, I

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: just had a couple more questions. And you just touched on one of them, which is, do you anticipate in some way because I've not heard of the problem, you know, across the board, local police, state police, and sheriff's departments is staffing. And do you anticipate that this would help that problem in any way?

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: So, I am fortunate in saying that my department has historically done well on the staffing conversation. And even in times where it's like, hey, we just lost two staff members within a few weeks to months, we have filled those vapes. The state police, in their testimony in the Senate, they reported that their situation is improving. I'll defer to them to speak for themselves, but it's improving. So, are we seeing improvements? Yes. I think there's still future opportunities. Do I think it's going to be impactful? No. Because we're going use existing resources to do the thing. We're not changing the provisioning of services. We're not expanding. We're not trying to elevate the authority of the sheriff. We're in fact using existing authority, existing constitutional expectations, existing concepts and constructs in law to say, let us just do this one business side of things a little different that actually makes sense to everyone.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: And then my final question. Thank you. And my final question is this. We've talked in this committee before and it's in the news sometimes about how it's a challenge for sheriff's departments. It sets up a weird dynamic with having to kind of hustle for these contracts and to have to make money to pay for things you don't have to pay for. And I believe we can. I think we can all agree it's led to some mismanagement of finances. It's led to some really tricky situations where it's not always comfortable with people in towns. I'm wondering if. First of all, I'm going to interrupt myself and say I really appreciate the accountability measures that are I wish the senator were still here that are worked into this. Rutland and I have worked a lot on government accountability and transparency, and it's good to see those check backs in there. So to not interrupt myself anymore, what I'm wondering is there's a train and it's moving If you see it. So I guess I'm wondering if if if there if you anticipate or hope or have thought about how maybe having this council could help sheriff's offices and departments avoid those mismanagement things that I think probably start out of sometimes desperation or being in a financial pickle or whatever, and then things kind of degrade from there.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: We have thought long and hard about that. So this bill is not intended to solve all things with sheriffs. This is problem to just talk about. In fact, my time before this committee has been about sheriff's accountability issues many times over. I am sick of Yeah. I work hard. I work really hard to make a good reputation for myself, but also for sheriffs. And it's frustrating when I have to come before you and say, someone who shares the same title as me did something dumb, and now we need to talk about those things. And this is why I still have faith and belief in the institution. These are the ways I think we bring value. And sometimes, we don't like the system that we have. But this is not a sheriff's accountability bill. This is an idea to talk about governance that would help do a thing that my towns agree on. So to your what I think is your question, representative, does it do some of those things? Oh, yeah. Okay. But it's not designed to be the accountability mechanism. This is not gonna change anything in the constitution. This will not change any way I can be certified or decertified as a law enforcement officer. All those mechanisms continue to exist. But what we are trying to do is formulate what would be foundational building blocks to the future of what I could see the legislative changes that will come. But I need to get support from stakeholders and other members, sheriffs, community members, the voters. There is a variety of issues to talk about all of those things, as we explored about four years ago through proposition one, which was a constitutional change to how sheriffs are qualified or not qualified to be sheriff, to S-seventeen or Act 30, which was a sheriff's accountability bill that we worked on in this committee. There's a number of issues that we are talking about in all of these things, and they are a great example of Vermont. They're organic, they are interwoven, don't fully understand why they ended up that way, but they did because someone had a need and so built out from there. And now there's a sprawling thing of why is Mark do gonna go on a bit of a sidetrack here, and Jeanette's gonna yell at me for a second. Why does Mark do lead abatement in houses in Windham County? Because no one was doing

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: that. Found

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: a way to get a million dollars for Windham County, so we did it. But why are we the ones to do it? Because there's no public health at the county level. So we got $1,000,000 from a federal grant that is designed for county governments, and it's random, but it's all the things the sheriff does, and so we did it. Do I think that's a viable model? No. I think that we should start to expand personal opinion. I think we should start to expand what the county governments are responsible for in the state. But it should not be a relationship between the town and the county, which then interferes with the town and the state. But this is a third rail. So I'm going to stop here and just say, like, there's a huge conversation I have about county government. We just get into weird, mucky stuff. And what we found in this bill is how to get the town supportive, how to get the county supportive, how to get the state supportive, how to have VLCT come in and say, We like the idea of this, because it starts to solve some of the problems that they've raised for decades in a way that doesn't make anyone really that mad. It's fun leapfrogging the problems. That's what we have done. I can talk about problems for hours, but we're leapfrogging them to solve the questions that the sixty plus years or sixty ish years worth of studies have identified as problems. We know we'll have to do those.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Great. Hango. Hopefully this is quick, and I'm not sure if you're the person I should ask this question of, but a neighboring municipality to mine is looking at starting up their own police department. And the only way they think they can do it is by having collaboration with other towns in region. How is this different from your project?

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: Great question, and legislative council will be able to talk about the thing I can never remember the name of, but it's how municipalities basically build another municipality to work There is a permissive to allow for that process, Working with VL Coffin, because we asked the same question of, is there a better way? Working with VL Coffin, what we basically come to the conclusion of, the method that exists is not great. It's great for other things, but it's not great for provisioning policing services. And so the issue with towns, you generally have, in fact, I believe it's occurring in Windsor County currently, and sounds like in Franklin County as well, I'm happy to talk to you about that specifically, you have a town that's willing to be the host. So, we'll say it's the town of Mark. And in the town of Mark, they say, we want to do this, and we're going to do it with the town of Jeanette. And then, something happens, and the town of Jeanette is upset that something happened, and the town of Marks Board disagrees, and so then it creates an invite. A lawsuit happens. Usually the way I presented this, the towns would say, we all agree that we have dirt roads, we need to grade the dirt roads. Do we all need to own a grader? An argument could be no, they're expensive and we use them three days a year. An argument could be yes, we use them on the same three days each year. So, we share a grader or not? That's a very tangible way to start talking about how do we do these things. Does the domestic occur in Athens just as much, or I should say just as possible as in Putney? Yes. But there's a correlation of population that domestic is more likely to happen in Putney, which causes more service to that town. So how do we start to look at these more intangible things around law enforcement service? So the towns working together, oftentimes they come together, it works well until it doesn't, and then we see it fall apart. We have seen that happen numerous times in municipalities throughout Vermont. And I'm trying to leave names towns out just for the sake of I'm not here to shame it, I'm here to say the structure of how we're asking towns to do the thing is hard, especially when we're asking them to do all these things with the same six people that have to solve all the town's problems, which is why I'm doing an animal control program, they

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: just don't know how.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. Can I ask counsel the

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: name of that, if you caught that?

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Have you met yet with the new director of animal welfare? Have. Isn't she the best?

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: I do believe so.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Okay. I just wanted to make

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: sure you would talk to her about that. She has a million ideas about things like that.

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: I hate to detract from this bill, but I really think it'd be cool to let or have veterinarians submit to town clerks rabies certificates. Play off course here.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Stay on target. I'm keeping the guardrails.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: We got the best for that.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Okay. Anything else, share bears? You know what to excuse it? Cool. You. Senator. Yes. Goes to show how much we've all had thoughts on this concept and other policies that surround. Senator, so good as well.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: Thank you, for having us here to talk to you about this bill. I'm gonna just make a couple comments first. First of all, when Wendy talked about, and Senator Harrison talked about, Wyndham County being similar to the Northeast Kingdom, we have found that Wyndham County is the hardest county to provide any kind of phone service, because it has a lot of hills, but they're not really very high, and they're very close together. So, it's an odd place. The other thing I wanted to comment on was the committee itself. You know I love this committee. I was chair of government operations for sixteen years. And when Brian Collamore, Senator Collamore, joined the committee, what he referred to it was the surprise a day committee. You never knew what was going to come up during the day. So I just wanted to comment on that. So I'm going to try to read my comments. And I might be repeating a lot of what Sheriff Anderson has said. And I'm going to read through them because I contend to ramble a lot. And I know you don't want rambling. And your chair has just said guardrails on.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: You get all the hall passes.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: So serving on government Senate government operations for twenty years gave me some insight into our law enforcement system. While the players are good, the system itself defies logic and explanation. Studies going back to at least 1967, as Sheriff Anderson said, have made recommendations. Almost all of them have been completely ignored. In 2017, Senate government operations took a tour of the state to hear about our system. We went to eight locations across the state and heard from between four hundred and five hundred people. We heard from law enforcement, select board members, citizens, advocates, state's attorneys. Their input pushed me to keep on this journey. That's why I'm here today and working with the sheriff. One common theme from the studies and hearings was the need for regional policing. With the exception of a few places in Chittenden County, where there are abutting towns with existing police departments, this has not been successfully addressed elsewhere. And I will tell you that a conversation with the Brattleboro Police Department the other day, I heard that when we heard it, it was about $300 a resident to have a police department. That is up to about between 5 and $600 a resident to fund a police department in a town. Wyndham County, as you heard, has four towns with police departments, and they are spread out. They're not abutting. I could be wrong, but my guess is that the reason this works in Chittenden County towns is that they each have their police departments and they have cooperative agreements between them. This is a problem for communities where there are no police departments that abut each other. On the tour that I mentioned, we heard from two towns that did try to contract with each other. Manchester had a police department. Arlington did not. Arlington contracted with Manchester, but soon became unhappy because they felt they had no input into the policies or the governance or anything. And the Manchester Police Department agreed that that was the case, and so it ended the contract. In Wyndham County, we have been working on this idea for a really long time. It was probably twenty five years ago, and Sheriff Anderson referred to that, that the sheriff and two chiefs came up with this brilliant solution. But as you heard, one chief died, the other took a job with the state, and the sheriff retired. End of project. Most recently, sheriff Anderson has been working on this for about three years. And yes, he has talked to every single town. He has talked to select board members. He talked to legislators, assistant judges, town managers, interested public, anybody who would listen to him. In fact, he tried to talk to people who didn't even want to listen to him. He was so passionate about this. Sheriff Anderson has explained why this is needed from a law enforcement perspective, one of his many areas of expertise, and why our current system of contracting doesn't work. He has also addressed the funding and governance, and that's what I'm going to emphasize right now. This proposal creates a governance structure that has oversight authority and is made up of those it serves. It is made up of a select board member from each town. And I will address that to your question. What we heard that, we heard this strongly from VLCT and from some of the other towns. The select board members in a town have control of their budget. They're the ones that create the budget and pass, well, the town passes the budget, but they create the budget. This governance board will be dealing with budgets that will affect their budget. So it should be a select board member that has that input and that authority and that responsibility for creating the budget. That's why.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Yeah, I was just curious because a lot of things are

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: is. Lots of times, could And originally, we thought it didn't have to be a select board member, but it came very strongly from BLCT and some of the towns that it should be a select board member. It will address the governance issues. It will create bylaws, coverage, sustainability of the program, the membership, quorums, committees, budgeting, all of that. The council will be formed when there are at least five towns who decide to participate. And at that point, they can begin the business of governance. You'll see in a minute that this should and will all happen prior to funding. That gives them, the council, the ability to concentrate on governance before having to deal with a budget. This bill is needed to allow the council to set up and function. Currently, there is no provision in law that would allow this. So this is necessary. The funding for this pilot will come through a special county assessment. The budget will be developed by the council working with the sheriff. The budget will reflect the coverage that the council asks for. The more coverage that the council wants, the higher the budget's going to be. Then it'll go to the assistant judges who will incorporate into the county budget. It will appear as a special assessment on the town tax bill. It will be assessed to the participating towns based on population. And it's based on population at the request of the towns. We originally thought maybe it could be a com some kind of formula of grand list and population and mileage or something. But grand list doesn't indicate the need for law enforcement population, really does. And they felt that that was important. And our towns themselves are used to dealing with that because that's the way our local EMS program is. They pay per resident to the ambulance service. The timing for this is out there. It isn't gonna happen right away. The process means that there would be no actual funding for at least a year, maybe a year and a half. It would have to be approved in the town budget at the earliest at the town meeting in March 2027. And then start in July 2027. This bill is needed to allow, as sheriff Anderson said, the county to assess a tax for law enforcement. It doesn't exist without this bill. You will hear that this is a new tax that's been referred to, and that the governor has stated no new taxes. This is not a new tax. The towns are currently paying for law enforcement through their property tax, and this would be no different. It will simply spread out those costs more evenly the county to the town. And that is determined by the towns themselves, how that will happen. You'll also hear, perhaps, that the assistant judges don't have the time or the capacity to take this on. Our two Wyndham County judges are in favor of this pilot and have assured everyone they can do it and are ready to. And it will not affect any other assistant judges in any other county. You will also hear that it is not needed because Vermont State Police provide this service. I'm not the person to talk about this. Sheriff Anderson did a little bit. Our towns can tell you how much time and how timely and how much coverage they actually receive from Vermont State Police. And I don't wanna disparage state police because I know they're understaffed and overworked, but, the coverage is not time. You may also hear that regional policing is a good idea, but that it should not be the sheriffs who do it. But we've been talking about this for at least fifty years, and no one else has come up with any kind of a solution, any kind of a doable plan at all. Now we finally have a well thought out proposal. It seems the sheriffs are exactly the people to do it. They are already a current county entity, and they work with all the towns in the county. Ask your constituents, if you are unclear about that, ask your constituents in your rural towns who they think would provide them service if they called 911. My guess is that most towns, and we heard this on the tour, would say the sheriff, of course, the sheriff is the county sheriff, until they find out that the sheriff isn't paying for it and isn't going to provide the service because they don't have a contract. And I believe you have just passed a bill around a study on county governance. And it seems to me that these two things dovetail nicely, that they can learn from each other and they can I haven't read the bill, so I shouldn't talk about it, but I know that you worked on it and I passed it?

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I'm actually doing the run through in Seneca Vox this afternoon.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: Oh, great. So, and I think that you already have brought up kind of the elephant in the room, the sheriff's departments that seem to get in to some of They're them

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: in the news on occasion.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: They are. And there are issues. And there are bad actors. But we also have some really great sheriffs, Orleans, Lamoille, Chittenden, Wyndham. And those are just the ones that I know where I know the sheriffs personally. There are others out there. I don't know them all. And this is true in all professions. So please, I ask you not to assign the misdeeds of some to those hardworking sheriffs that are out there. And this is not, as Sheriff Anderson said, this is not an accountability bill, but it might lead to some suggestions for how we deal with accountability of sheriffs. Remember, this is a very limited pilot. It is Wyndham County only for a very stated number of years, and it is limited to law enforcement. No other pressing regional needs. There are many questions to be answered about regional policing. In this case, it will best be answered by those who are the most impacted, the towns through the council. The council working with the sheriff participating towns, towns with police departments, assistant judges, VLCT professionals and advocates, and all the others, they are in the best position to answer the questions that have been and will be raised, because we don't even know what all the questions are yet. It will be addressing them in real time, in a real situation, not in a hypothetical situation with no context. This is exactly the purpose and definition of a pilot. That's what this is. I don't know if you have any questions. And I know I repeated a lot of what was already said, but I think it often needs repeating.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: Anchors the point, right, Senator? Repetition.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I was just wondering if you could paint a picture for me of day one of this council meeting and how you're going to manage and make sure that all the expectations are flushed out about what you can do, what you can't do, and set it up for success.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: Oh, of course, sure. In my magic crystal ball here, I suspect, first of all, it says that there need to be five towns. There are already 17 towns that have expressed interest. My guess is that if this passes and becomes effective on passage, that sometime over the summer, the towns will appoint members. They will hopefully be able to start meeting in the fall. And my guess is that they will have to find a room that's big enough to support 17 or 18 people. And your conference space will not work. And that they will My guess is that somebody will emerge as a potential chair or leader, because that happens a lot in situations like this. And I think Mark will explain what the bill that passed and what their responsibility is. And they'll have to start thinking about bylaws. We, at one point, did a mock bylaw that was based on Regional Planning Commission bylaws. And that they would start just talking about raising some of the questions and bringing up the questions. I would expect nothing to happen in the first meeting except that they raise a lot of questions and get a lot of background. And then somebody emerges as a leader and they start working on a set of bylaws and trying to figure out what kind of coverage they want and how are they going to do this and begin all those governance issues before they start talking about budget and hours of coverage. I don't know if that is helpful.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, I was thinking also of the decision making process. There

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: are a couple people in Wyndham County that, in some of my other positions, I've worked closely with who are really, really good at facilitating those kinds of large group settings where it's kind of chaos to begin with, and nobody knows what they're really doing and what they're supposed to be doing. And they're very good. And I might even suggest to the sheriff that he hires one of those people to facilitate that first meeting. I've seen it happen with a meeting that took place because they were going build the bridge over 91 over the West River. And it was the ugliest bridge you have ever seen in your life. And it's the entrance to Vermont from Massachusetts and also the entrance to the West River Valley. And it was such an ugly bridge, and there were about 50 people that came to a meeting, including me, saying, What the world is going on with that ugly bridge? And this one person organized the meeting and facilitated it. And when we left at the end of that meeting, things were clear who was going do what and what, and now we have a really beautiful bridge. It is very beautiful. Remember that. If you've never Over the bridge is beautiful, but if you've never been under the bridge on the West River, it is exquisite. The top is like this, and it's painted blue, and the water reflects up on the It is a beautiful bridge. It was all Yeah. So, there are a couple of people in Windham County that are really good at that. And so I'm going to suggest that.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Reprisal.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So how many towns are

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: there in Wyndham? There are 23, I believe. And four of them, well, three have their own police departments. So that leaves 20. And then one

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: And where's your office?

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: We're currently located in Bradburn.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: All right, Bradburn. What's the little office in Newfane.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: That used to be the sheriff's office and the county jail. And it's now the Wyndham County Historic Site.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: I'm raising my hand in the chairs

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: and here. Guess my fault. It's all on yourself.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: 23 towns. I counted 18 when Sheriff Anderson was saying that there are 15 towns then three fifteen towns that you cover, and then three towns that have police departments and one village that has police departments. So is my math off somewhere in this? I could be off. I have not counted them lately. When I count towns in Wyndham County, when I used

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: to count towns in Wyndham County, I never counted Wilmington because Wilmington is actually in Bennington County for purposes of the Senate district. And Londonderry is, yeah, but they're approximately 22 or 23. Okay, great. And there are 15 that are contracted now, two that aren't, that don't have police departments. And both of those two towns, or at least one of them actually wants to testify saying they want this. They don't contract now, but they sell.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Are there any other questions on the table? That was a lot on what we thought was going to be a really high level overview, but it was really good. So I feel like we got a lot out of the way. And now we have this huge list of witnesses that we'll call when we take it up again. So I appreciate all of the things that you mentioned. And we would be willing to

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: reappear to talk about any of the details here. And I would just throw my support behind this and say, I think this is a really good bill as it stands right now. It's got the support of the towns. It came from the towns, and it is a pilot. I would urge, I know in Senate gov ops, there was a suggestion that maybe they could add some things that the council has to consider, put some parameters on. I would urge you not to do that because then it becomes less of a pilot and less of the legislature deciding what's going to happen. And when I said that this pilot would be happening in a real situation with real people that are impacted by it, that's what we need. And not to disparage any committee work, but I don't think we need a hypothetical solution that isn't in the context of where they're being impacted. So I will urge you to just not try to monkey around and add things. I know, because I was here for twenty years, I know that that's what legislators like to And I also know that because we're a Dillon state and we don't even really understand counties at all, The legislature really likes to tell counties and towns what to do. And you're closer to your towns than the Senate people are. Yeah, enough For your recommendation, we have another question here.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: It wasn't a question, it was just a comment. Just as we're wrapping up, I just appreciate the way only a true GovOps enthusiast would say, oh, when they were told there's a hearing about regional governance. I just, I appreciated and connected with that deeply.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: I have asked to be part of that. You have to

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: repping often.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: I just want to say thank you for answering my question. Was just more of it was curiosity why it was phrased that way. And Yep. Because I see the conformity with others. No. I I understand. I appreciate it. I thank you for answering.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: You're welcome. Thank you for asking

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: it because it it is weird because usually we say appointed by this.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Well, thank you very much for making a trip all the way up here, both of you, and reach out to us if you happen to listen in and hear something that you'd like to comment on.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: We will try to be I probably will not come up again because My schedule is pretty tight, but. We'll be available on that. Did you know that last Friday? For those of you who are here last Friday, Friday the thirteenth. Yes. March 13 was six years to the day when we left this building and didn't come back.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Our chair announced that in the morning it brought back a lot of memories for those of

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: us who were here, good and bad. Yes. And those moments when you had to give a report or say the pledge of allegiance and stood up and you had your pajama pants on.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: And you were shown on screen from here down. It was an interesting time for sure and hard to believe that we were part of history like that. Looking back on it, I even have a hard time remembering what it was really like. And I

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: don't know if you were aware of this or not, but our leadership at the time and our tech people here were so smart and got it going so fast that the US Senate called and said, how did you do this? I was not aware of that.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: And that is really amazing to hear. Had no idea how it happened so quickly also, because all of a sudden we had this technology, this capability to do something that we had never done before. And suddenly everybody in the world was using it. It was really an amazing development, if anything good could have come out of COVID. We're just discussing that last Friday was six years to the day that we were sent home.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: That was a day.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. And I do love your committee.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: I never was on

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: House gov ops because I never was in the House. But,

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: yeah. We won't hold that against

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: you. Thank

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: you.

[Sen. Jeanette White (former Chair, Senate Government Operations)]: I would be really careful about inviting anybody from senate gov ops up here to your room, however, because I don't know if you know the size of their room, I know they only have five members, but they often have 25 people in there.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: We actually would, on occasion, we have to do a joint hearing. We just shoehorn them in here.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: And they were quite incredulous of our accommodations. Yes.

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: So welcome you so much, Senator. Thank you. Committee, that wraps our conversations for formal table discussions today. We have to poke at an agenda for next week and also, have a couple of other conversations about bills that are floating around the building. So I'm gonna

[Sheriff Mark Anderson (Windham County)]: take us

[Rep. Matthew Birong (Chair)]: offline, until, a touch