Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Martin LaLonde]: Alright. Welcome to the House Judiciary Committee on this Tuesday afternoon, February third, and we're gonna start with the Human Rights Commission and Dave Hartman, who's gonna review and report and and give us some input on some of the priorities of the Human Rights Commission. Thank you for being here.

[B. Hartman]: Thank you so much for having me. For the record, my name is Big Hartman. I use theythem pronouns. I'm the executive director and general counsel at the State of Vermont Human Rights Commission. It's nice to see you all again. So yes, I do have a report that I want to just discuss with you. But I thought before that, I'd take a step back since it's my first time in this committee this year, maybe give you a little sense of what our office is going through right now. As you probably recall, the mission of the Human Rights Commission is to advance full civil and human rights in Vermont. We have primary enforcement authority in three areas of anti discrimination protections. So that's in fair housing, which makes up typically more than half of our open cases at a given time. Places of public accommodation, which is extremely broad in Vermont. That's going to be any place that's open to the public, including schools, hotels, businesses, restaurants, any kind of public office, including state and municipal departments, police, corrections, you name it. And then our third area of jurisdiction is in employment, but we only have jurisdiction over state employee discrimination complaints. So those are employment discrimination complaints brought against the state of Vermont as the employer or prospective employer. All of the other types of employment discrimination complaints are handled by the attorney general's office civil rights unit. There is no overlap between the cases that we accept and what they accept. It's we're kind of carved out with their general jurisdiction to address employment discrimination. So that's the overview. As you

[Karen Dolan]: maybe know the answer and you've shared before, I apologize, how is the Human Rights Commission established? Is it statute? Is it

[B. Hartman]: If you could answer it. Yes, we have enabling legislation set out in Title IX. I call it the Human Rights Commission Act. And it lays out that we have these three areas of jurisdiction, that we have a commission that are governor appointees. We have five commissioners, including Coach Christie, who has been serving as our chair for many years now. That lays out our jurisdiction our complaint process, as well as the confidentiality of most aspects of our cases. So the existence of complaints at the HRC is confidential by law, But we do share the investigative file with anyone who's a party to any case. And if we find reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred in a case, that is a matter of public record, and the party names are then disclosed. And if we have a settlement agreement that is public, that is also part of the public record.

[Martin LaLonde]: Do you represent the state in state employee discrimination cases or the individual state employee?

[B. Hartman]: So we do not represent any party to a case that we're investigating or that we're doing an enforcement action. We represent the Human Rights Commission and the public interest in investigating whether discrimination has occurred and enforcing our anti discrimination protections. When there is a state employment case, that's going to be the employer is represented by the Attorney General's office, which is why there was a need to have a separate office investigating those types of complaints. But in terms of representation, even when we do an enforcement action in court, that's usually going to happen after we've found reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred. There will have been a complainant who was the plaintiff type position in our investigation, And that person is usually named as the aggrieved party in our complaint, not Superior Court. But we, the Human Rights Commission, are the plaintiff bringing the case against the respondent.

[Karen Dolan]: Can you remind me if somebody is filing an employment discrimination case, if they also can go to the EEOC?

[B. Hartman]: A great question. Employment discrimination at the state level is enforced by the Attorney General's Office Civil Rights Unit and ours. And then federal claims involving often very similar legal protections are usually dual filed with our office or the Attorney General's Office Civil Rights Unit and the EEOC. You get a case number for both. There's a cooperating agreement that the state of Vermont has with the EEOC so that we are usually doing most of the investigations involving cases that took place in Vermont. And then we share our findings and our investigative report with EEOC to enable them to issue a right to sue letter that would give someone the right to file a lawsuit in federal court to enforce their rights under federal law. Under state law, you don't need a right to sue letter. So we don't issue those in

[Karen Dolan]: any way for any of our cases. They don't provide you any funding, I assume.

[B. Hartman]: The cooperating agreement, the Attorney General's Office, Civil Rights Unit, since they have the bulk of those cases, they are entitled to some payment per case. It's not very much. Your only funding is general

[Karen Dolan]: fund or

[B. Hartman]: not? For our the only non state source of funds that we've received historically have come from HUD. And this is pursuant to a cooperating agreement to do fair housing investigation and enforcement under both federal and state law. So federal law for employment and for fair housing sets the bar for what is unlawful. And then state laws can do more than that and set additional legally protected categories or create additional protections. So historically, any case that's been implicating both federal and state law, we would dual file, which means we are the primary investigating agency. We let HUD know. We have this Fair Housing case that also is implicating Fair Housing Act. Then they stamp it, give it a HUD number as well. And then HUD would pay us per case. Historically, that's been under about 10% of our overall operating budget. As our budget has grown in the last few years with new positions getting added, that would be a little bit less. But since we're talking about HUD, I might as well give you the HUD update. It's been a rough year for civil rights at the federal level. And our federal government is seeming to do everything it can think of to dismantle and deprioritize civil rights enforcement, not just of the Fair Housing Act, but kind of across the board. And what we're seeing at HUD is the section of HUD that handles fair housing is called the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Division. That was basically completely shut down. During the shutdown, they laid off all of their non headquarters employees who were in Region 1 of HUD. Since those employees were reinstated, we really have heard nothing from them and are not receiving any more cases from HUD. So historically, HUD has its own intake division. We do intake. HUD would often accept something for investigation, send it to us, and we would do the investigation. Probably about 20% of our cases historically would originate with HUD. The rest would start with us, and we would dual file them with HUD. We have not received any more cases from HUD, although we know sometimes someone's going in and seeing that we've added new cases for dual file. The most concerned There are two really concerning things that HUD has done this year. First of all, we have not been paid for our twenty twenty five cases. So when I became director in 2023, I saw this as a place, the HUD contract, as a place where we could grow our budget because we get paid per case. There's no shortage of fair housing complaints coming in the door. So we prioritized our fair housing enforcement activities in fiscal year 'twenty four and 'twenty five. That really paid off. Well, let me say it should have paid off. Because they pay us per case, we really increased what fair housing cases we were able to close and get paid on in fiscal year 'twenty five. And then at the end of the fiscal year is when we tally everything up with HUD, we say, these are all the cases we closed. We all make sure that our list is the same. And then they tell us how much we've earned under our cooperating agreement for the prior year. And then they cut us that check without really much to it. This year, they did tell us that we earned $187,000 for all of the casework that we did in fiscal year 'twenty five. That amounts to twice what we were budgeted to receive from HUD. So we were really excited. We were going to have some actual extra money to do proactive prevention work, outreach and education. However, And they have not issued us that drawdown voucher yet. And they have not given us any word about when we will expect to receive that money. Typically, we have it by September. So we're in February now. It's looking bleak. And that is why we go on to the budget adjustment process to adjust our budget just slightly. We ended up just to be able to maintain basic operations and have no extra money for outreach, education, or prevention work. We really only needed $25,000 So if you are looking closely at the line items in the budget adjustment for fiscal year twenty six, we're slated to receive $25,000 just to be able to kind of keep the lights on and keep all of our staff employed for this fiscal year.

[Karen Dolan]: Is our congressional delegation able to help with collection at all?

[B. Hartman]: Some of my counterparts in other states have started to reach out to their federal delegations for exactly that hope. And it's on my list of to dos to see if there can be any assistance. The word we're getting from our point of contact at HUD now is, like, he's waiting for HQ to do something. But, like, they did tell us before the shutdown, there's gonna be a new voucher process this year. It's not just gonna be a simple signing off. This year, you'll sign it first, and then we'll sign it, which historically, we get it signed, then we can just do the drawdown.

[Karen Dolan]: I mean, I don't know if you have other options for collection, given that you had an agreement and the work was

[B. Hartman]: Yeah, and they haven't come out and said, We're not paying you yet, which could enable us to pursue legal options. But as of now, it doesn't feel wise to plan to receive that money this fiscal year. Perhaps we'll get it after some back and forth over time. We're also very worried that next year, it's not even going to be an option. First of all, they have not sent me a cooperating agreement for this fiscal year at all. So we're already halfway in it. We're acting as though we're still under an agreement, so we're complying with our end of the deal. And at the same time, HUD has informed us in the fall. They informed all of the agencies like ours that they were going to be reviewing their criteria for eligibility in this program. And any state or municipality that has legal protections greater than what's legally protected under the federal Fair Housing Act is going to be deemed no longer substantially equivalent, and basically they're going to destroy the program. So it's sad. For our office, it doesn't hit as hard as it does for Massachusetts that has $2,000,000 they're planning to receive from the federal government to keep their 25 staff employed and continue to do fair housing work. Karen,

[Martin LaLonde]: you have a question, then I can.

[Karen Dolan]: Yeah. So it was about the Okay. So 50,000 that's in

[B. Hartman]: the BAA? It's only 25,000. I was trying to

[Karen Dolan]: look it up, but I know you'll just know off the top of your head.

[B. Hartman]: We included that in the House passed version? Yes. And was that in the proposal from the governor as well? Yes. So that was appreciated. Okay. Yes. I'm just trying to understand the dynamics of that. Is that something that we really need to fight for? Or so far it's going through. It's gone through so far. And we were grateful that we could talk to the administration about the concern about the federal funding. We were able to really do our projections for the year very conservatively. We're really spending what we would on professional development, merit increases for staff or doing any using any of our operating expenses for the outreach and prevention work that we were hoping to be able to do this year. But so we made this conservative estimate 25,000. I think the administration appreciated. We weren't saying we need the entire 93,000 we budgeted to receive from the federal government. We only needed less than that. That's that shouldn't be an issue. Fiscal year twenty seven is a whole another issue.

[Unidentified Committee Member A]: So trying to understand this, the federal level, is the administration at the federal level, do they control this? Or how much of it do they control? Because I'm I'm hearing the shutdown. I think we're headed to another shutdown. I was just checking on that now. And the shutdown between the congress and the senate is what's really messing it up, or is it the administration, or is it a com combination?

[B. Hartman]: It doesn't seem to be related to the shutdown. It seems to be related to a shift in federal policy on doing fair house fair housing enforcement. These funds would have been appropriated for last fiscal year, last federal fiscal year.

[Unidentified Committee Member A]: So not my forte, but is it just something that is really needed nationally to be followed and we're not in at the national level, we're not funding this properly?

[B. Hartman]: Yeah, the federal government, at least in Vermont, its impact on fair housing enforcement it happens through our office. It happens through the federal government funding state and local agencies to do investigations and enforcement work. HUD itself doesn't tend to get too heavily involved in too much fair housing enforcement. They do it through funding channels for local agencies like ours.

[Unidentified Committee Member A]: So also, are you kind of working hand in hand with, like, the ACLU or something like that? Do they play into this? I realize it's a separate entity, but is there do like you play off from each other for lack of a better word?

[B. Hartman]: Not really. Not in the fair housing world at all. The ACLU, though we do see as a community partner, and they rarely but sometimes will represent complainants in our cases. So those are folks who have us claimed discrimination they've been discriminated against. Sometimes ACLU will represent those folks. Sometimes it will be Vermont Legal Aid. Very rarely we'll see a private attorney representing complainants in our cases. But most complainants are, in our cases, unrepresented. And we are tasked with doing impartial comprehensive investigation of their complaint. So we're not representing them either.

[Unidentified Committee Member A]: And I assume they're unrepresented for the fact of what it costs to to do that. It's not affordable if you're in that situation.

[B. Hartman]: Absolutely. The reality with fair housing and with any civil rights enforcement is that if you didn't have an agency tasked with investigating and doing enforcement, there really wouldn't be a lot of civil rights enforcement at all, because you'd be relying on the most vulnerable, marginalized, and poorest folks to do enforcement work in court. That would be like filing their own lawsuit in court. And Vermont really has a scarcity of civil rights attorneys who have the ability to take the chance of representing folks in civil rights cases with the hope that they would get paid after a jury award or through a settlement. So sometimes folks can go through our process, though, get an investigative report with a summary of facts and a legal analysis about why we think there's discrimination here, take that to an attorney and say, will you represent me? And sometimes folks will leave our process filing their own lawsuit with the benefit of our investigative work. Sometimes we file our lawsuit, and a private attorney will take on representing somebody they have their own lawsuit about similar or the same facts. And then we often join those two cases in court for discovery purposes.

[Martin LaLonde]: Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member B]: So

[B. Hartman]: just to carry that federal fair housing thread a little bit further, in addition to the concern that we are likely to be deemed no longer eligible for the Fair Housing Assistance Program from HUD, we also are concerned that if we ever do get a voucher for this year, that it's going to have these new federal fund strings attached that you may be hearing about. And they're particularly concerning for us. They laid out these new mandatory provisions for all of our agencies in the fall. But I haven't yet been asked to certify compliance with those provisions. It's a laundry list of stuff, some of which seems to have no bearing on anything we would do, like providing that we promise that we won't provide abortions. But then there's things that are going to directly impede our work. One is promising compliance with the executive order pertaining to so called gender ideology and basically would have us go directly against our state law that protects people from discrimination based on gender identity. They also want FAP agencies like ours to agree that we will not do any DEI work, which is basically all of the trainings that I provide to community members, could easily be categorized as diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And then the third really kind of red alarm concern that is a new mandatory provision prohibits us from issuing any findings related to disparate impact, which is one of the foundational ways that civil rights jurisprudence has developed. So you have disparate treatment. I think I was treated differently because of my membership in a protected class. Then you have another category of cases called disparate impact, which is not intentional discrimination, but it is where there's a policy or practice that has a disparate impact on members of a protected class. This is how we came to address disparities in voting, segregation, equal pay, all these big issues that bring us a little bit closer to an equitable world. So the notion that we would receive this small amount of federal funds in exchange for agreeing to doing those things is concerning to me. I don't see how I could ethically sign on to that and be able to really fulfill the mission of our agency. So that's the federal world. What we are requesting from the legislature this year because of that concern that there will not be any option to receive federal dollars in fiscal year 'twenty six is we are asking that we not plan on any federal dollars. We be enabled to continue to pay our staff and keep the lights on throughout the year. And instead, the governor's office has recommended that we plan to have a $65,000 vacancy savings built into our budget. So our office has nine employees total, including me. $65,000 vacancy savings would mean that I'm leaving a position open for almost a year potentially, or that we furlough our entire staff for a month. So that does not seem feasible or wise to plan.

[Unidentified Committee Member A]: Can I

[Martin LaLonde]: ask a question about that? Sure. Vacancy savings, would you have to eliminate one of those nine positions that are currently filled? Or do you have a position that's not filled yet that you would

[B. Hartman]: fill? All of our positions are filled. All of our staff are doing more than one person's job. And so if I had a vacancy because someone voluntarily left, I think that the governor's office expectation would be that I don't fill that position for however long it takes to realize that savings. But if no one leaves, which I certainly hope no one is leaving when we have turnover, it does really bring a lot of things to a screeching halt while we recruit and train someone. There's a lot of onboarding needed to join our team. I would be having to figure out how to achieve that savings some other way. And I think it's very unwise to plan on that, especially when we all know that right now civil rights are really under attack. We no longer can rely on the federal government to be a partner with us in enforcing our civil rights protections. And so, actually, in addition to filling the void of that $65,000 shortfall from the governor's recommend, we're also asking for an increase in positions to enable us to meet the needs of these times. As you may recall, last year, I was in here asking for eight positions. We got two, and that was amazing. Those positions, one was another staff attorney investigator, bringing our total number of investigators up to four. I hired someone that had served as an intern with us and was able to literally hit the ground running in August. We also received an intake coordinator position, someone full time to staff the phones, staff the HRC inbox that is constantly bombarded, and do the intake process of conducting intake meetings and drafting complaints that we accept for investigation. That position, I also was able to hire someone who had already worked for the HRC. And he was able to start, and I literally handed him 100 files on day one in August. The next hiring process will not be so seamless and beautiful, but we were really able to make the most out of the appropriation with those two additional positions this year, and we're we're very relieved to have that. And at the same time, I still turn people away every week because of backlog and caseloads. And there's really a need for, I think, additional policy work that we don't have as many partners as we once did. We've seen Vermont Legal Aid especially lose a lot of funding this year. There's less folks that they're able to represent. There's less referrals coming from our office. Folks are just having to call us hold instead.

[Unidentified Committee Member B]: Is legal aid federal money too that they've lost?

[B. Hartman]: Yes, they've lost some federal money. I'm not sure if they lost other money as well, but they did have layoffs this summer that have impacted the two discrimination projects that they would use, the funding streams that they would use to represent folks in our cases. We're requesting three new positions. Investigator. One is a policy director, someone that's just full time working here at the State House, tracking bills and doing also assisting with, like, the working groups and committees that get created each year that we serve on and don't really have a lot of capacity to meaningfully contribute to too often. And also just kind of address bigger guidance policy that's needed statewide now that we aren't seeing HUD this year also pulled all its guidance memos off of its website and withdrew a bunch of long standing guidance that we'd all been using, including housing providers, for how to enforce our fair housing protections. And we really need to fill that void ourselves. Yes.

[Karen Dolan]: So just trying to make sure I capture all of this. Ashley, you have a $65,000 savings to address that. Then you also said you're adding new you're looking to add new positions? Yes. So how I don't know if I get that piece. So you said you have nine right now. Correct. And so you wanna add on top of it? So does your budget request for more than what you have in the previous year, and then it's asking to have 65,000 less from that? So would it be that you just wouldn't be able to add a new position?

[B. Hartman]: What I what we're asking for is that we'd be not asked to budget in that $65,000 savings Yep. And then add three additional positions to what is recommended by the governor. Okay. So that's a conversation with appropriations. But if at some point you want to talk about it in more detail, I'm happy to go into more detail on that right now too. And is this because you said there's a backlog, so there's more work than can be done and so need these new positions? Yeah. And I would say historically, our office has been drastically underfunded. And there have been times before I came on, for a six month period before I came on in 2021 as an investigator, there was a six month time period where we just did not accept any new public accommodations or employment cases because of staffing. Now, our staffing has grown. In 2023, for fiscal year 2023, we were given one new position, which is senior counsel position. That's our litigator, who currently has about anywhere between fifteen and twenty cases in active litigation now where the Human Rights Commission is the plaintiff. In cases where we already did the investigation and we found reasonable grounds to believe that discrimination occurred, we weren't able to achieve a settlement in those cases, so we have filed lawsuits. More than half of those are housing. And then last year, we got those two additional positions. So we've grown just since I started in 2021 from six positions to nine. And still every day we make resource based decisions. Can we afford to litigate this case? Do we have the capacity to accept this case for investigation or these five cases for investigation? And if we do accept cases, they're gonna take at least a year. That's where things are at. And that is not ideal for anyone, especially in housing. We're talking about folks that are living in someplace right now or facing eviction right now, which they believe is discriminatory. And we aren't able to give them an answer on whether or not it's discriminatory for often at least a year. That's what clarified. I just really appreciate this and painting the landscape of it

[Karen Dolan]: because I think many things that are wrong right now. And I feel like for us as a state, it's how do we navigate all of this? Just huge losses at vulnerable populations. And so that's why I'm just trying to clarify and understand this is because it's likely we're going to have to make cuts in areas. We're not going be able to fill all those gaps. And so for

[B. Hartman]: me trying to understand this, if you weren't to add those three positions or not all of them, maybe two or what, would you be whole in your budget then? That's what I'm trying to understand is that what we would be whole and being able to operate the way that you are doing. The minimal way to have us be whole for fiscal year twenty six is to fill that $65,000 vacancy turnover savings. The way to make us whole and then be able to meet the needs of Vermonters right now would be at least three more positions. And I think part of that is that we don't have counterparts in the federal government anymore also working on these issues, as we're the last line of defense.

[Martin LaLonde]: Okay, so let's get to some of the policy recruitment as well, because we have twenty five minutes.

[B. Hartman]: I knew this would happen. And unfortunately, I was like, I can use an hour. There's so much to talk about. Let me give you just a couple of things before I go too far into the summit recommendations, because I don't know if you want papers. I like papers, so I always come with papers. You can count on me for this. So what I have is our annual report from last year and kind of a summary, which is our fiscal year 'twenty five attic plans, which gives you a nice overview of how we've been working on improving our services. We've been trying to close more cases, and we've successfully done that. We've closed more cases than ever before in fiscal year 'twenty five. We also settled more cases than in the prior year. We also brought our average case age at closure way down. So the average case age now is about a year, as opposed to when I started, it was closer to two years. So that is because we have streamlined a lot of our report writing and been able to stabilize our staff a bit more. Because when you are short staffed and you're trying to do civil rights enforcement, it's a burnout role. It's very hard to stay in the role for a number of years. And so I'm now the most senior employee at the Human Rights Commission. I've only been there for four and a half years. And now, though, we feel like I don't want to jinx it, but I think we're kind of stabilized for now with our staff and hopefully won't have to deal with any more vacancies or turnover coming up. And then the other handout I have for you, and I realize they look totally identical, and that was not Branded. KIM: on purpose. But I made right, it's my brand. Exactly. I also made a midyear summary of how things are shaping out so far this year. So far this year, we are right on track to have the same number of complaints, but we'll probably have more new complaints this year than last year. And I'm not sure, I can't tell yet if we're going to have more case closures or not. When you have a new staff member come on, she got on her first day, when she started in August, she got handed a full caseload of cases that have been on hold for a while without anyone working on them. But this year, we have already doubled the total amount of settlement compensation paid to complainants. You may have been hearing in the news about some of those, especially discrimination cases that we have settled recently. There's more to come on those. But that's just to give you a picture of what we've been up to so far this year. And then I have the copies of the summit report. So this is the full document summarizing the policy recommendations. Oh, you guys have color printers over here. I had to get this done at the print shop. Oh, wow. I'll repeat my color. All right. Do you but you all would you like copies of the summit report? So this is a broad it covers a a kind of a broad range of issues involving Vermont's civil rights issues and our most vulnerable and marginalized community members. So let me give you a little background. Oh, I do have slides I can share, too. So let me get myself Can I ask a question while you're Do dealing with you have any idea where that $65,000 figure came from? Is it, like, the the yeah. My it's my impression that there's, like, a 3% target increase for all agencies regardless of salary increases and operating expense increases that are just built in. There's nothing, like, that we're flexible with in terms of our expenses. So it was it it's my impression it's the goal of meeting the 3% Okay. And nothing more targeted increase, which we've never been able to achieve as long as I've been keeping an eye on the budget. Because when you're so small and the exempt employees have raises because the governor gets them raises, and they've not been less than 3%. As well as our fee for space, we have a BGS building. That means rent goes up every year. It doesn't go up by 3%. It goes up by 10%. Other operating expenses just go up and up like everything is with inflation. Yeah. So I we have asked about why why are we building in this $65,000 turnover savings, and we have not been really no explanation has really been given. Thank you. Alright. So sharing slides. Okay. So I tried to do some quick slides for you that would give you an overview of the recommendations, some of which might be very relevant to your jurisdiction, but some of which you might not be super interested in because I'm going to talk with the other committees of jurisdiction on that stuff. So just by way of background, this year, like many folks in the civil rights world, I was kind of crippled with fear and concern about our community and how we are going to be able to hold the line with civil rights. So my middle of the night idea was to host a summit gathering Vermont's civil rights defenders, community members, and concerned citizens to talk about strategies that we could use at the state and local level to try to address the weakening of our civil rights protections at the federal level. And so our goal was to bring people together and to also really do practical strategizing about what we can do. So it was really a community driven event that we hosted. And we covered a range of topics, including housing, immigrant justice, trans rights, disability access, education equity, equal protection, and racial justice. So I'm going to just go through the topics with you, and I'm happy to go deeper on any of these specific recommendations. These are really recommendations that are community driven. I don't have a policy director. I'm one person. We are a small team. We really have to lean into the subject matter experts within our community who are the front lines of defending our civil rights and trying to make a more equitable world for everyone here in Vermont. So to the extent I can't give you the details on some of these recommendations, I can certainly point you in the direction of the people I would speak to about these recommendations. And if you are wanting to hear more on any of these, you can actually watch the summit discussion about these topics. Each topic had at least one panel presentation, and they were all recorded by ORCA media, so they're available online for you to watch and get more information about what was discussed and who was discussing it. Obviously, housing is at the top of a lot of folks' minds right now. We see it's really intersecting with fair housing, the lack of housing, and the lack of affordable housing, and the homelessness crisis is all kind of coming to a head right now in Vermont. And so housing advocates are recommending that we create a state funded rental subsidy. This is to address the reality that federal Section eight is frozen and likely to decrease. There are years of waitlists for Section eight housing and for Housing Choice Vouchers. People are literally on the waitlist for years. And now they're not accepting new people on the waitlist. So the only solution for that issue to ensure that there's more subsidized housing available is for there to be a state funded program, similar to what we see with Section eight. There are also a lot of proponents of ensuring that there is an end to no cause evictions, which we see is increasing homelessness rates drastically. So there are a couple of bills now that have been introduced on the House side to try to improve that situation and reduce the amount of no cause evictions. For our jurisdiction, we would very much like to see housing status be added as a legally protected category. And this has been proposed for a number of years that folks be protected against discrimination in housing, employment, and in places of public accommodation because of their housing status. That is a proposal. I'm not sure that it's been written into a bill that has been in use just yet this year. Advancing inclusionary zoning is a way to ensure that while we are increasing the stock of new housing, we're ensuring that that new housing that's getting created is inclusive of the disabled, lower income folks, families, and the elderly. And there needs to be Usually, it's around local initiatives to ensure that that kinds of zoning is encouraged.

[Unidentified Committee Member B]: A little definition, I guess, on an inclusionary zoning. I've never heard the term.

[B. Hartman]: Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a concept that is counter to exclusionary zoning. So when we have zoning that allows for a single family home on a lot, that is one way that we are often reducing different levels of income in a community. We're going to have moderate income folks, and there's going to be an exclusion effect of folks who are poor, folks who have disabilities, elderly folks. And so inclusionary zoning are there's a range of tools that local zoning can use to ensure that we have more diverse housing communities by ensuring that we have families, multi three bedroom houses instead of one bedroom apartments that will enable more people of a diversity of our community to live in one place, as opposed to having segregated communities. This is where the low income folks live. This is where the wealthy neighborhood is, and they're different. So inclusionary zoning is about bringing more diversity into local communities, at the neighborhood level. The folks that I defer to on as experts in inclusionary zoning would be Rachel Patterson at Vermont Legal Aid and the folks at Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.

[Unidentified Committee Member B]: Wouldn't that depend a lot on real estate funds?

[B. Hartman]: It can also, though, when we're talking about building new housing and trying to increase the stock of available housing, there are incentives that you can provide to ensure that new housing that does get built is more inclusionary. And then there's economic benefits to be derived from a more diverse community in your housing.

[Unidentified Committee Member B]: Yeah, but the initial cost for something to start is gonna be this real estate piece of land itself, where in some neighborhoods it's gonna be, you know, a quarter acre in one neighborhood could be worth, you know, $7,080,000 dollars, and another neighborhood could be worth $30,000. And if somebody isn't gonna sell for $30,000 when they could get, you know, $70.80 for

[B. Hartman]: And again, I'm not the expert on real estate. But what I can say is that I know that there's a lot of innovation, especially in some of the Act two fifty reforms that are trying to incentivize developers to do more diverse housing instead of just building the biggest house on the smallest lot for the wealthiest folks. Because the shortage of affordable housing is really scary right now, and it's what's driving up our homelessness crisis. And again, there are amazing minds working on that housing world, including a lot of the nonprofit housing providers as well. And Let's Build Homes is another organization that's doing a lot of good work on figuring out how to incentivize inclusionary housing. I can just add something from very little experience in Williston, because we did pass inclusionary housing, inclusionary zoning in And it's very specific to a certain targeted growth area as well, generally speaking. It's in those downtown or growth center areas that we're talking about with proper infrastructure and all of that. So it's just another way to introduce, incentivize the introduction of a variety of housing options in specific area. Yeah, I think it's mostly a locally driven thing to go about doing, but there are some statewide policies and programs that have an impact on what local community flexibility may be. And again, not the expert on this. There was a roadmap to end homelessness that was created in, I want to say, 2015 or 2017, and there is a very strong need and urging of all folks in the homeless advocate community to please revisit that and revise it and really study the issues about how there are pathways to ending the very high rates of homelessness that Vermont is experiencing that is disproportionate to our population and really dedicating some great minds and resources to creating and updating what the original roadmap is called for right now.

[Martin LaLonde]: Just a time check that we have about ten minutes. Definitely, if you could focus on the ones that probably cross into the jurisdiction is like number six, number eight, number seven is really corrections more than judiciary. Would that be possible or do you want

[B. Hartman]: to Yes, just was gonna try. No, you're absolutely right. There are definitely some that are to have on your radar. And that I think, especially with immigrant justice and immigrant issues, I'm seeing a lot of activity on the Senate side that's likely to come back over here, hopefully, this session. So one of the big issues is around immigrants that are held in Vermont's detention centers for the civil They're civilly detained. So I just want to really emphasize that these are folks that are being detained for alleged civil violations. They are not being charged with any crimes. They are also being fairly systematically denied access to legal counsel. And there is no state funded, like public defender type system for them as of now, there is a bill. That's been introduced, I think it's here in this committee H seven forty two that seeks to create a state funded access to counsel for folks who are being held for a civil immigration issue. And reality is that when these folks do not have access to counsel, they are much more likely to be removed without due process. Whereas if they do have access to counsel, especially the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, which has grown exponentially in the last year to address the very high level of need for this type of service. When VAP is able to get representation of these immigrants, they are much more likely to stay here in Vermont and have their case heard by a Vermont judge and have better outcomes overall. And I implore you to hear from Jill Martin Diaz at the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project about the important work that they were they are doing in ensuring access to justice for those folks who are federally detained in Vermont. Their work, though, has, you know, become more and more difficult as they have recently become encountering new barriers from the Department of Corrections in gaining access to their clients and ensuring that their clients have access to their federal removal proceedings in court, which is like through a WebEx process. So VAP has testified to house corrections and institutions about that concern. We are very concerned about that issue and want to explore possibilities where the Department of Corrections would be able to ensure equal access to medical, legal, and language services that all other folks who are in DOC custody have. There's also an effort to safeguard community spaces. And there's a couple different bills on the Senate side about that. S two zero eight and S two zero nine are relevant to this recommendation. S209 prohibits civil arrests in sensitive locations. So we already have a protection that folks who are going to and from court proceedings are protected against civil arrests without a judicial warrant. The S209, it would expand the areas, the locations that folks would be protected against civil arrests to include schools, shelters, hospitals, medical care, and I believe municipal and state government offices. So we strongly support expanding those areas of community spaces. And then S-two zero eight is the bill that is trying to ensure that any law enforcement officers conducting law enforcement activities in Vermont have their identity known and are not wearing face coverings. So those are two big pieces that we do hope will be advanced this year. As you may recall also, there was an Office for New American Study that was commissioned last year. I'm sorry to interrupt.

[Martin LaLonde]: But just to make sure that I get to ones that we're gonna have in here. I mean, I agree with you that that's important, but that's really not we're not gonna really have any influence on that in this particular committee. I mean, individually, we do, obviously. And I'll let you decide if you wanna just go through it that way. But jumping ahead on the civil rights enforcement, I think actually number 11, we will have you in again for a brief period when you tell us exactly what the budget ask is. So we'll kind of redo that. The disability rights are all important stuff, but not in this committee. But Justice for All, if you could talk about those three, because those are, we touch those in those committees. I just wanna make sure that we're using your time and the committee's time, because I am going to have to take a break in about five minutes.

[B. Hartman]: Absolutely. And I don't want to go over my time, so I appreciate you directing me to what your priorities are. Appreciate it. So We would like folks to entertain the equal protection constitutional amendment, this is also known as prop proposal or proposition for. It's in the second part of its cycle here through the state house, where it's already passed in the House and Senate in the last biennium, it comes through again so that it can get on the ballot for next year. And this would ensure that people are not that people are insured equal protection based on their membership in a variety of legally protected categories. And this is basically enshrining in our constitution what we don't have yet, and which most states have some version of an equal protection amendment. There are a lot of folks who have more to say about this bill, I mean, about this PR proposal. Proposal. Proposal. The Vermont Commission on Women has been a proponent of an equal protection constitutional amendment for decades. The Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, Raise Up Justice, the Attorney General's Office, Civil Rights Unit, and many others. The Office of Racial Equity also are all wholeheartedly supporting passage of this amendment. There was a really great on the incarceration piece, there was a really great panel at our summit, which I encourage you to follow the QR code to see about the big picture question of what's wrong with our incarceration system and prioritizing incarceration over community supports and restorative justice. So there are some incredible advocates in Vermont talking about these issues, and I encourage you to hear their panel. We also did have a panel that talked about the fair and impartial policing policy. We really I think it was one area that all the panelists were in general agreement that Vermont is doing this policy pretty well. There's always going to be concern about racial profiling in policing. And there are ways that we can bolster the carrying out of the fair and impartial policing policy through increased training and resources, especially to support law enforcement in ensuring that there's social workers and other types of interventions available when someone is having mental health crisis. And so that panel was also a really great group of folks from the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council, the Department of Public Safety, migrant justice, and others that were really having a really important discussion about how we can move the fair and impartial policing policy even further, not necessarily change the terms of the policy, but to ensure better training and supports for law enforcement in taking the best care of all community members that we can.

[Martin LaLonde]: Great. So the last in the education equity, most of those really are not in this committee. If number 22 moves out of the education committee, because I believe there's a bill there dealing with removing the severe or pervasive, We would probably touch that on what we call drive by. Others really are not in this committee.

[B. Hartman]: I appreciate that. The education committee did give me an hour last week to talk about those recommendations and all of the work that our office does in trying to address and prevent, especially harassment in Vermont schools. It's so easy with all the talk around education and funding and financing and structuring of education to lose track of the focus on ensuring that all students are protected from discrimination and safe in their schools. We really are seeing an uptick in those cases. It's currently about 25% of all of our cases are against schools. And they are resoundingly going reasonable grounds in those cases. And those are a lot of the cases that we're seeing our biggest settlement figures coming out of as well. So we are trying to prioritize that as an enforcement area. And again, it's hard to do when there's so many other areas of enforcement. Just about on the education front and recognizing this is not the education community, but in your hoped for budget with the staff that you're trying to build up, would that allow for additional training? I see the problem in schools is largely a training, I think, a training and preparation and response problem. Agree. You know, there's a lot going on societally that we should also talk about, about how kids are doing and how they're treating each other. But things are not being handled well in schools, and it seems to really get back to training and lack of understanding on the part of administrators and folks in schools. Would your budget allow did your proposed budget, even though I haven't seen the proposal, I hope that's a fair assessment. But our characterization, would it enable the Human Rights Commission to perhaps reach out and do more training to then reduce ultimately your caseload and the harm that's being done? Absolutely. Definitely having a policy director too will help us provide more leadership on the issue broadly and free up my availability because I have been doing more and more trainings in schools in response to settlement agreements. They're extremely well received. Educators and staff at schools are hungry for information about what they should do and what the process is supposed to be and how to prevent discrimination and harassment in schools. And there's just not other leadership in the state providing that education. So we want to be able to get ahead of these issues. We want to have fewer of these complaints come our way at all. And we're just not able to get out in the state enough to provide that prevention education that I think that the state really, really needs. So the more that there can be other team members also able to work on those issues other than investigating complaints, the better. And that's why the policy director position is at the top of my list. And also, can tell, just from my ability to articulate about some of these recommendations, how badly our office really needs someone full time to advise on these bigger picture policy implications on civil rights. And I really hope that we'll be able to have more conversation about that. So I appreciate if you do bring me back in, I'd be happy to talk a little bit more nitty gritty on the budget issues that we have for fiscal year twenty seven. Thank you.

[Karen Dolan]: I think I was confused. I thought that was part of today too. So I apologize about the We deep into

[Martin LaLonde]: We have a preview.

[B. Hartman]: Since I was here. Thank you

[Martin LaLonde]: so much. Really appreciate work that

[B. Hartman]: You both did a great job. Understanding your limitations, that policy is not like you're saying. Thank you. Okay, well thanks. I appreciate that.

[Martin LaLonde]: So, no, I appreciate it. And thank you for the work you folks are doing. And we will adjourn, I guess fifteen minutes, there'll be Thank 20 you.

[B. Hartman]: I'm sorry, did go a few minutes over. We did start for

[Martin LaLonde]: a few minutes.

[B. Hartman]: Well,

[Martin LaLonde]: that's