Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Catch you in a goopy hello, everyone. Good morning. It is Tuesday, April 14, day before tax day. Make sure you get your filings in. We are beginning, work this week on h five zero eight, an act relating to approval of amendments to the charter of the city of Burlington. And we are reviewing and considering a senate proposal of amendment to said charter. Counsel.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: For the record, Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Council. I'm here covering for my colleague, Mr. Gene Anderson. So, you have this Charter amendment in front of you. You know, the House sent over language to the Senate. The Senate has made a change. So I'll walk through that pretty quickly. It's relatively straightforward. Just to reorient the committee, I'll just quickly mention what the House version was. Just sent a request. Okay, good to So this is the language that was asked by the house. Just a quick reminder, you know, this is about the district boundaries for the city of Burlington and, you know, when the city has authority to change or alter those district boundaries. And so you're striking out all the language that was passed years ago that outlines the specific boundaries, and you're giving the city council the authority to then change those boundaries under certain circumstances. And the key sentence is really going to be on line 21, and then moving to the top of page 11 here, where you all had it to say that the changes shall not be made more frequently than once in every five years. And the other key language is on lines 20, where the boundaries can be changed in order to provide an equal division of population among them in accordance with data produced by US Census Bureau. But then you had this limitation that the changes shall not be made more frequently than once every five years, and the senate has altered that. There were first off, there was the addition here on line 11, where they said that you can make changes to boundaries of election areas pursuant to this section. So as you can see then, there's still the language of in order to provide an equal division of population. So that hasn't changed. It's just an identification that it can be done pursuant to this section. The key thing is lines thirteen, fourteen, and 15. Where you all said that it can't be done more frequently than once every five years, this language says that the city council may change election area boundaries following the taking of the decennial census and whenever necessary to correct an unconstitutional division of population. That could conceivably happen more than once in a five year period, in which case the city council would need to take steps to make that change. So that's the amendment from the Senate and that's the change. Okay.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Hang on one second. Just wanted to jump in here real quick. And so in conversations I had since folks sitting around the word configurations, one of the pieces, my understanding was they're doing so much building in Burlington right now, especially with vertical stack and pack housing that they are playing that term. So but they're they they have seen and they're also anticipating scenarios where this, like, building boom could skew district numbers, and they wanna be aware of that, not to have the be at whack with the population. Sorry. My brain's not really focused this morning. So that was something I had heard from folks with the as to why here. Apologies, Rep Hango, Bennington.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. That was the first part of my question. I just wanted to make sure that that's where that came from, and it sounds like it is. And the second thing is, is there definition of unconstitutional division of population?

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: There's not a definition, but the constitution requires under the equal protection clause that individuals vote is essentially counted with the same weight. And so if you have districts that are not designed such to have an equal distribution among the population, then it could be unconstitutional.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: So I wonder how that's going to be determined, if there's going to be a specific process to determine that.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Potentially defer to the city as to how they would go about making those determinations. But as the chair mentioned, you could have situations where in a municipality, have certain housing developments that go into a specific ward area that, although it may only be a few thousand individuals moving there, it could shift the population away from other areas such that they need to be redrawn. How they would go about making that determination of when they would make those reviews or how their attorney's office would go about that, I would defer to those.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: So I will ask the rest of the table if anybody remembers what the city of Burlington said about that, because I think it came up in testimony and does want to know what they said.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: There's a bill activity tab on the bill itself.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: What am I asking?

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: Redwater's answer. Sorry.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Well, I just weirdly opened exactly to the page I

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: needed for my notes on the charter. Was on

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: May 2025.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: No, this is January 7. So,

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Rutland, what was your question then about how the city is going

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: to determine when to call this special redistricting?

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I think according to what I have just found here, is that they just, it says they were wanting to do it as necessary. Right, like, what I was.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Because I don't know what criteria they're going to use to call for this.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Well, if I made it, it says like census data, like, I'm sure. Rep Nugent really wants to say something. Rep Nugent.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: He's got the same question as me, I got.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: I think what they said was that the census does these, interim counts, that they use statistical analysis to guess or what's the bad word?

[Chair Matthew Birong]: They can figure out Phone. Yeah.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: Phone. I also have the same question because I don't think it's unconstitutional to wait every ten years either. So I it's an issue with this language.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: Council, did you want to say something?

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Two things. I I think it could conceivably be unconstitutional if you have some sort of significant population shift in an area. And so, it's not required that it have to be done every ten years. You have the census, and so then states and municipalities will look every ten years because, you know, that's when we do a census. So it is conceivable that it could occur or something could become unconstitutional before a ten year period. And then the last point I was going make, think you mentioned it, Mr. Chair, was brought up. It is based on, the limitation in the section says that it is based on data that's produced by the US Census Bureau, which is updated. I don't know how frequently it's updated, but it's not. Every ten years they do update it more frequently than that. But there is the limitation that the city has to base it on that information. So the city wouldn't just be basing it on some sort of alternate set of population criteria that have some basis in the US Census Bureau's data.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Next question

[Chair Matthew Birong]: is I got Waters Evans, and I got VL, and I got Yale.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: So I guess I'm wondering, if there were a situation that came about within that five year period that was unconstitutional, wouldn't that automatically mean that they could redo it because it wouldn't be legal for a lab?

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: Means that they

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: would need to, yes.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Yes. So I guess I'm wondering why this extra permission is needed in the charter if it would already be happening anyway.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: So I wasn't there. You know, this is this is Tucker's bill. I wasn't in the Senate committee when they were going through some of this discussion. I think the concern was probably the language that came out of the House seemed to restrict their ability to do it more frequently if necessary, because the House language said that it could only be done once every five years. It couldn't be done more frequently. And so my understanding is the argument then as it goes to the Senate is, but wait, we could have situations where we need to do it more frequently than once every five years. That's why you have this change, to say that it can be done when it's necessary. So it would be done, the language is following the census that's done every ten years, and whenever necessary to correct an unconstitutional circumstance. So I think I think the senate version is is better addressing the question that you have if they're required to do this because the constitution mandates it. Yeah. Then I think the senate language would authorize that, whereas there's an argument to be made that the language that came out of the house initially may not have allowed that because it limited them to only once every five years.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Okay. Yep. Thank you.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: This is a little more nimble. I got rep Coffin, rep Hango, Pinsonault. Yeah. I was just wondering if you knew what the percentage variance is, plus or minus, that would trigger this as well. I do not. No.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: My apologies. Not my Not my portfolio area of expertise. So I wouldn't be able to tell you what the courts have said as an acceptable margin

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: looking for witness testimony, was unable to find it, but I've mastered. Assistant, but I'm now wondering about the word unconstitutional. That, to me, puts big burden on this. I guess I wasn't really thinking about that aspect of this amendment. I was taking it a little more literally. Just don't know if I like the idea of the city council just whenever they want, whatever criteria they come up with, deciding to fall for redistricting?

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: So I would say the language is limited in that. It says that the city council can only change the election after the census, or whenever necessary to correct an unconstitutional division of the population. So if it's not meeting one of those two criteria, then they wouldn't be able to just redraw them every year or every two years because there's some ulterior motive there. And then the second limitation I would say is it is limited to the data produced by the US Census Bureau. So they wouldn't be able to come up with their own information, or a party of the city council wouldn't be able to come up with its own information from some other source than the US Census Bureau data to try to argue that something is unconstitutional. So it does have those at least high ends or limitations there.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Did you have a follow-up?

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. I guess I would be more comfortable if the word unconstitutional was taken out and just to correct a division of population or a significant division of population and to have them have a set of procedures within their own office as to what would trigger that. So

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I think having that word unconstitutional may actually be helping alleviate some of your concern. I mean, if you were to remove that word, for example, and you just said whenever necessary to correct a division of the population or a significant division of the population, I think that would give the City Council more leeway to make changes more frequently, if the City Council felt that there was some sort of alteration of population within the city that may not rise to an unconstitutional change, but they still felt that they wanted to alter boundaries at that point. So I do think having the threshold B, it's necessary to address an unconstitutional division of population. I do think that is a higher threshold for the city council to have to meet in order to make the changes, just to make any alterations to the boundaries.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: I will probably defer to counsel on that, because it's just kind of sticking with me that we're making exceptions to the rule for one municipality, and I foresee having to do that in others down the road.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: I guess I'll then, Rep Sondheim.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: No way in here does it say that they can add another award if needed. That has certified. They already have several districts compared to the rest of the state, and I wanted to make sure that they wouldn't if the population got so large in the city of Burlington, that they would need another ward. Does this allow them to add another ward?

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I am not familiar enough with your municipal title or the City Of Burlington's charter as to how and when they go about creating new Board boundaries. Boards themselves. This is only It's only changing.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Discussing the boundaries. This is not speaking to adding or consolidating words. This is only about the ones that exist. If there are eight.

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: Do you know why they did the five year thing? Because the census is every 10. Correct.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: So, it's going back to, again, my understanding, The amount of building that's going on right now and how that will shift the internal populations, whether it be a shift within the existing population or addition to the population and allow them to because when you exceed the number of residents within these defined boundaries, you're out of compliance ish. Right. So this allows them to do deviations to that more in it, but also in accordance to U. S. Sets of data provided. So, you know, they're they're working off of numbers that are being produced outside of their sphere, if I'm understanding it correctly.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Yeah, I would say the amendment is, as I mentioned, the House version said that it couldn't be done more than once in a five year period, and the Senate version is saying it can be done after the census or in order to address an unconstitutional distribution of population. That's the change. And so you're just authorizing it to occur more frequently than once every five years. And my understanding, Mr. Chair, is similar to yours, is that you have certain housing developments that are currently under development in the city. And if you have a limitation of saying you can only do this once every five years, one of these housing developments comes online, it moves a few thousand people into a given ward, now you potentially have an argument that there's an unconstitutional distribution of the wards amongst the population. But your statutory language says you can't change that because we've limited you to only once every five years. Now the city can't make that required adjustment. Somebody would have to probably sue them, take them to court, get some sort of court order arguing that they must do a redistricting. And so what the Senate proposal is doing is saying, okay, we'll take away that five year limitation, or that cap on only once every five years, we'll allow you to do those redistricting whenever it's appropriate under the constitution.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Mary- Katherine, then representative.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: I just wanted to say, sounds like there's a good litmus test limited to the census information and then constitution. And I just looked up, so I can talk about what I found about why we did this. That's okay, point of information since Tucker isn't here. So there was an unconstitutional population imbalance in city boards based on the 2020 census data. And the primary goal is to achieve less 10% population deviation between wards to ensure equal representation, while addressing community concerns over divided neighborhoods, such as in the South Bend. It also touches on Ward 8. A major focus is reducing the student population from Ward 8, previously roughly 75% by shifting boundaries. That's my ward. And that is an area where there is a lot of population growth and it changes a lot because of the student population. So, I will just say that anecdotally, I've lived there ten years. And when I first lived there and bought a condo on College Street, there weren't as many people there. And now there's been more and more housing built up. Even on the street I live on now, King Street, there's two huge housing structures, whatever, that have been built in the last year and a half, like apartment units. So in my ward district, whatever area where I live, there's been a huge population boom. So I'm not surprised that that's one of the reasons they need to bring

[Chair Matthew Birong]: this forward. There's also the South End In

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: less than two years.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Over by where?

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: And in the South End. So, yes, South End's one thing, but I can just That's tell fast. Ward 8 was stated here as one of the areas because it's where the VFW used to be. They took down the VFW, and now there's a huge housing project. It's where nobody's living at the VFW. Now there's going to be hundreds of people living in that same footprint. They

[Chair Matthew Birong]: keep living Rutland. Oh. Rep Nugent. Or I'm sorry. Were you done? Repstone?

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Yes. I've got this point of information that I looked up.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Appreciate it. Repstone. Sorry. Nugent. Come on, Coffey. Do your thing.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: I'm just sort of trying to clarify, and then I also have a question. So it seems like part of what we're sorting out here is that this applies only to Burlington, this type of situation. I guess maybe, there's a few other are there any other municipalities that have wards where they elect their city council based on that in Vermont?

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I'm sorry.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: So I guess it seems like if it's constitutionally required to redistrict when the population changes, that that would already be allowed. So I'm curious, do we even need to put that in the charter? Or is it in the charter, maybe erroneously to start with, that it's based on anything beyond just federal law?

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: I think so this bill is just addressing Burlington's charter. And so what I don't know is I don't know what other cities in Vermont, what their charters articulate. What I can say is I'll share real quick one more time. So I think the issue here is, in Burlington's charter, you've outlined what the ward boundaries are. That's what all this language that's being struck, from pages one all the way down to page ten, eleven. So you all have articulated directly in their charter, this is what your boundaries are. And they were amended, I believe, back in 2023. And so I don't know the reasoning behind why the city wanted to go about doing this charter amendment and why they're wanting to bring this specific type of language to you, my assumption is, as opposed to having to go through the Charter change process every time they need or want to change those word boundaries, which as you all know, that's to go and be voted on by the individuals, come to view, bill introduced, go through the bill process. My assumption is they're just wanting to take that boundary out to then authorize the city council to go through that process without them having to do the charter change amendment on top of it. And so then if you're going to give them that authority in their charter, you all have the ability to limit their when and how they go about doing that. And that's what this bill did, and then was subsequently amended. It's more focused on, okay, we're going to give you the authority to do it. You're not going have to go to the Charter change process, but we wanna put some guardrails on how you go about it, when you go about it, what information you're utilizing when you go about it, etcetera.

[Rep. Kate Nugent]: It just yeah. It seems it seems to me that if the constitution is controlling all of state law, that would, supersede anything that a charter would say or even that Vermont law would say. So it seems unnecessary if it's already required and legal encouraged to redistrict based on census data.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: So the Constitution is just going to require that, again, each individual has an equal vote, essentially. So you can't have election districts, whether municipal or at the state level. You can't have districts that essentially provide it to where certain individuals have more say so in elections, based on the fact that there are lesser number of people there, or there are more representatives covering a smaller number of population, etcetera. That's really what the constitution would require. How the state or how the municipality goes about then drawing their lines, when they redraw them, etcetera, that's all gonna be up to, you know, the the state. You know, elections, generally speaking, are governed at the state level and not governed by federal law. But you're having to underlay that with the fact that the Constitution does require this one person, one vote concept. And so even though the federal constitution requires that, it's going to be up to the state, it's going to be up to you all with this charter as to what the boundaries are, when they need to be redrawn, etcetera, as long as you're remaining under that constitutional requirement of one person, one vote. And so I think that's really what this is more to address as I'm reading it is, let's simplify this so we don't have the boundaries actually articulated in the charter. Let's give the city the authority to redraw them when it's appropriate. And then how do we actually articulate that in statute such that they're required to comply with this constitutional provision? And I would say that that's what the bill is intended to do.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: And I want to be conscious of time, but I have a hand for Representative Waters Evans.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: It seems to me like this is going to make it easier and more accessible for people to vote and for them to have equal representation. I'm all for it. It seems like it's just making things clearer and that we're not causing a problem we didn't intend to cause.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Rep Stone, Memphis and Hope. Gina? Oh, did she? Oh, apologies. Rep Stone, Memphis and So,

[Rep. Sandra "Sandy" Pinsonault]: read what they've just sent us regarding the testimony that we received before. And it says the proposed amendment would still require voter approval of board and district boundary changes in Burlington, but it would no longer require charter change. This would facilitate the administration of city elections and would put the city on par with every other Vermont city and not requiring involvement from the legislature, chairman award and district boundaries.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: And

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: I just want to say that just did some quick research. This is pretty common, especially in college towns. So the multiple states, red and blue, California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Utah, had this issue and done it for this reason. Lot of those have college, a lot of the countries where they've done it.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: College is the parent of colleges, yep.

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Gotcha. Because on campus housing and some of these older colleges is just not making the cut. So kids are having to move off campus and neighborhoods are seeing population booms happen as a result thereof, and they need to redraw the boundaries to make sure that they get it right. And they can't wait every ten years because that puts them up to have a federal lawsuit against the city if they are messing messing with things up. That's another reason it's being proactive instead of reactive.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: There's definitely a risk exposure there. Yeah. Rutwater's Evans?

[Rep. Mary-Katherine Stone]: Are we doing a straw poll?

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Yes, we are.

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

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Well, in theory.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: I was gonna say, I think, it seems like we make a motion for that or I think we should move to

[Chair Matthew Birong]: By the amendment favorable?

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Defy the favorable with our thumbs.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: Cool. Barring further comment, the table? Favorable thumbs on the amendment? That looks like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 90, j.

[Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel]: Favorable.

[Rep. Lisa Hango (Vice Chair)]: Alright.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: That was a good little jaunt to get the brains going for the week. Alright. Good job, team.

[Rep. Chea Waters Evans (Ranking Member)]: Thank you.

[Chair Matthew Birong]: We are on the floor. Mary-Katherine Stone, the representative of Burlington, will be the reporter of the bill. Thank you for