Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Ian Goodnow (Member)]: Hi.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Hi. Welcome back to the House Judiciary Committee. And this afternoon is part of Disability Advocacy Day. We're gonna have some witnesses present to us. I think I'm starting with Lindsay, if you could join us. Thank you for being here.

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: Plan my exit. Do have to be in some institutions out there. Just know.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Absolutely. That's fine. Just identify yourself and proceed. Thank you for being here.

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: Thank you so much for having me. I am Lindsay St. Amour. I'm the executive director at Disability Rights Vermont. I've been with the organization for thirteen years or so. Some of you looked familiar, so it's nice to be back. For those of you less familiar with Disability Rights Vermont, we are the protection and advocacy agency for the state. So every state has a P and A. DRBT is like 90% federally funded to investigate serious rights violations and abuse and neglect. We have a unique federal access authority that allows us to go into any place that people are receiving treatment as well as in the community. So we go into inpatient psychiatric facilities, correctional facilities, and try to offer services to anyone in the community where rights are being impacted. We also, as the P and A, we're designated by the governor to be the mental health care ombudsman. That gives us a unique role in providing an additional layer of oversight for folks who are involuntarily committed to the custody of the Department of Mental Health or temporarily in their custody. And that gives us access to critical incident reports for death and serious injury, as well as certificates of need for folks who are restrained or secluded or involuntarily medicated. I am also the vice president of the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights who put together this event for today, Disability Advocacy Day. Every year we do try to identify a theme that kind of resonates with legislators, with community members, and with ourselves to really motivate folks in this house to create policies that will work for everybody. So this year, our theme was write disability rights into every bill. So that we start with our policymaking decisions really from the ground. So we're looking at access and inclusion at the very first step of the process rather than as an afterthought. It seems like that should be a very natural thing to do because disability is a natural part of the human experience. It is the largest minority group in the country and in the state. Twenty five percent of adult Vermonters have a disability. And so really, it's not a matter of if, it's when and how many people our policies are going to impact who have a disability and how can we make that better and easier, more inclusive, and more welcoming. So as I said, it's the largest minority group. It affects people regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, income level. It's everywhere around us, and we have to start thinking about that immediately and to make sure that things work for our all Vermonters. So there are a lot of bills in front of this committee, many of which DRBT and the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights is paying attention to. There are a few that address competency and whether or not that can be restored, bills related to guardianship, bills related to forensic facilities, home and community based services, justice involved youth, and then protecting against discrimination for parents with disabilities through the Department of Children and Families Services. Then there was another bill, H. Six thousand one thirteen, which talks about accountability in officer involved shootings for people experiencing mental health crisis. So I had prepared some testimony a few weeks back for Mental Health Advocacy Day. We didn't get to that. It was submitted in writing. Not sure if anyone looked at it. I tweaked it a little bit for today. And then I'm also very well known for just going completely off book and not paying attention to what I actually wrote down. So I might do a little bit of that because I want to focus on what feels really important to me right now that I hope will resonate with all of you. And I think there are other folks that might touch on the forensic facility issues quite a bit, and that's something that I'm happy to go into a little bit. But I did want to share some stories, more particularly around the parental rights bill that you all will be considering. Because in my work as an attorney, prior to being the executive director, I represented victims who had disabilities through the criminal prosecution of their offenders. In one of those cases, there was a young woman who had a disability who was sexually assaulted by her foster father. She became pregnant. And then she gave birth to that child. And DCF was there when that baby was born and came into the room and said, We're going to hold your baby. We're going to evaluate the situation. And this young mother who had an intellectual disability didn't understand and left the hospital without her baby and then was accused of abandoning her child. So DCF continued to pull away that person's rights. She was not somebody who had ever used drugs before, but had just lost their child really unexpectedly and abruptly after giving birth. Ended up starting to use substances, drink alcohol, and her trajectory in a successful life as a young mother was completely derailed by the system that just made some assumptions about her ability to parent as somebody with a disability and as somebody who had been a victim of a crime. That story, I remember her name. I remember everything about her. I remember her face. And it's something that I think about all of the time whenever. It's not an uncommon story that we hear either. And so this bill in particular is really near and dear to my heart in terms of having a huge possibility of improving the system just across the entire span. Because when we start to support parents and their ability to keep their family united, that gives people hope, it gives people purpose, it keeps families connected. I think when you start to pull that apart and intervene with state action, the kids suffer, parents suffer, everybody suffers. And it just kind of compounds problems on top of problems. And as I said, it's not unfamiliar. We get calls all of the time. The tricky part is without something like this bill that really explicitly calls out the need to add protections, these parents are provided public defenders to be able to do this work. They don't necessarily have any specialized training in disability rights or requesting reasonable accommodations, and they have an enormous caseload. So they're not necessarily thinking about these things. And we receive calls from parents pretty regularly that say, help. I'm not getting accommodations. I'm not getting what I need. I can do this. I can parent. But I just need someone to listen to me and give me time. And the courts, unfortunately, say, you have an attorney, so have your attorney tell us this. Have your attorney make this request for an accommodation. We can't hear it from you. We need to hear it from your attorney. And then the attorneys oftentimes are too busy or don't understand that nuance and aren't able to do that work. So I think building in more explicit, stronger protections is going to have huge positive implications on the entire health care system. Just I think it'll be amazing if we can do something about parental rights and discrimination against parents. So that individual was one story. I've heard stories from Vermont Care Partners, again, where a parent with autism had DCF involved because they had a flat affect. And so they were involved with that parent because their inability to express the emotions that are more customary, I suppose, of a parent. And they had DCF involved in their lives for over a year. And so it's not uncommon. It's something that I really hope this committee takes a close look at. I think it will have really broad impacts beyond the work of this committee into many other committees. And it touches on the need to really kind of support folks in their communities as well. I'll share one other story specific to DCF involvement and disability based discrimination against parents was there was a mom, English was not her first language. And she had to support her husband who had many physical disabilities. And she was struggling, having a bad time with two kids, I believe, and had told her counselor, sometimes I feel like I just can't do it anymore. And unfortunately, that counselor alerted DCF as if that were suicidal ideation or something. And DCF became above and said, well, this does sound really stressful, so you have a couple of options. You can have your husband move out and go get assisted living level care, or we might have to intervene and take the children or try and support the children without you. So she was placed with this impossible decision of, do I choose to continue to try and support my husband with risking DCF getting involved to take my kids? Or do I take my husband out of my house because I can't provide for his health care and he needs to be able to stay in the home. So just again, that in particular is something that I'm feeling very passionate about right now in this moment on Disability Advocacy Day. So I will let me just check the time really quick, because I know we have some other witnesses. What time do we have until

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: I believe till 01:00. No, 02:00, 01:45. Sorry.

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: 01:45. Okay, 01:45. That is what I thought. So then I will just hop back a little bit into talking about home and community based services, forensic facilities, and those proposals. So the thought of creating an additional facility is, of course, from DRBT's perspective, based on the experience that we have with many, many individuals and the research we've done, if we haven't considered less restrictive alternatives, it's really It should be like a nonstarter because it violates the Olmstead decision and the integration mandate of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And don't know that the state of Vermont has done enough to really explore those alternatives short of a separate isolating facility. I know that in 2024, we did expand the use of restraint, seclusion and involuntary medication at River Valley Therapeutic Residence to kind of accommodate, I guess, the need for folks who didn't meet acute inpatient level of care. So we've already adjusted the system a little bit, and now there's new proposals to kind of still build at that higher, most restrictive, most expensive level of care without necessarily considering alternatives to those types of facilities. And I think the population that we're talking about are individuals who have not been adjudicated guilty of their crime. So there's a real risk of what is the purpose of these facilities and that it should not be a way to hold people accountable for something that the law cannot hold them accountable for and creating a mechanism to just kind of warehouse a population of folks with certain disabilities. I think that before we can kind of dive into exploring whether or not there needs to be a forensic facility, and I know there's been conversations about maybe changing a particular unit in an existing facility to be like a therapeutic model as an option. I think we still need to, before the state can really justify those types of expenditures and that type of a placement, we really have to understand the gaps better in our system and trying to address the opportunities to fix the systems before we get to that point. I don't think that anybody's utopia is like, oh, we're prepared with buildings for when stuff goes sideways and for when harm gets done. I think we would rather be creating a system where we're preventing people from deteriorating to a point where they're in these crises. A lot of what we're seeing, I think, in society are preventable situations if people got the supports that they needed early on and really robustly in the community with the aid of the state and other community partners. So I think I'm going to just wait because I know that we have a couple other I don't want to just talk at you all. So I can either answer a couple of questions or I can just defer my time to the other witnesses and stick around for a few minutes to answer any questions.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Angela, and then Barbara.

[Rep. Angela Arsenault (Member)]: Sorry, I'm eating my lunch. I really tried hard not to eat in it. Can you say a little bit more about what that looks like, the thing that hasn't been explored fully, the non secure community, like a effective community placement and therapy. Sure. Well,

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: yeah, I mean, I think that there is so much interconnection and overlap with many of the different committees in this house. And I think it comes from supporting supports in the community. And even I've heard testimony, I think it was last year or the year before, on this particular subject where we're talking about maybe a handful of people, maybe only like two people who need the support. And yes, it could be done in the community. Maybe we could add some security measures, but we don't have the staff. And I think for me, that's where a lot of this falls short is that we're not investing in the people who can provide the supports and the care in the community, either to help prevent stuff from happening, but also to support folks more intensely and more intentionally in their communities versus saying, Okay, well, it's going to cost a whole lot more money, but it's better than nothing and forcing people into institutions. I think there's a way to do it in the community if we were investing in people to do that work. It's really valuable work, but we're not investing in it. And so we keep saying, we don't have the people to help provide that oversight or to provide that care. That's not a good answer. Then that's what we have to fix. If we don't have it, that's what we need to fix, versus saying, oh, we don't have it. So let's do this other thing instead that creates all its

[Rep. Angela Arsenault (Member)]: own harms. Thank you. And what is the bill number on the parents' rights that he was talking about? Age three fifteen. Okay.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: 34

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson (Member)]: So, still, one of the things that we keep hearing about, and I just love your thoughts on how to address it, are people who are on a non hospitalization order who are not getting the treatment that they're sort of court ordered to get and what to do in that circumstance.

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: Yeah, I am not a clinician. I remember some of his testimony from Mental Health Advocacy Day, and I thought it was really interesting that the staff who are in the designated agencies who are providing that supervision and trying to provide that care also can't try to get anybody's help when that's not being successful. And they have to go through the Department of Mental Health who's not involved with that individual who can block any attempts to try and fix that and repair whatever therapeutic services need to be repaired. I mean, I think it's again, I think it's a real lack of community based services. I mean, there I think And a lot of times it's just so complicated, but I think a lot of times orders of non hospitalization are offered to folks as a way of getting out of the hospital. So it's necessarily all that voluntary. So I think that's a really tricky thing with our system is there's it lot is, even though we have this legislative purpose, to move towards a coercion free treatment setting, we're not. We're saying, you sign off on this or you're going to do all these things order to get out of the hospital. And so people feel forced to kind of do that, but they're not necessarily invested in complying with that and not necessarily involved in coming up with what that plan looks like for them. So I think

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson (Member)]: And I know we do it to people who have broken the law, but don't have a disability as well. It's like you can go to prison or you could do X, Y, Z. So I'm just wondering about two things. One is if there's a disagreement between the people that are hands on working with somebody in the state department, if you think it makes sense to have a appeal process so that it's not two experts coming up with different opinions and not having somebody weigh in on that or help break the issue?

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: Yeah. It's been a minute since I've looked at the actual words in the statute around those particular pieces. But I think you can, when you're talking about involuntarily committing somebody, there should be some sort of expert opinion about whether or not that's necessary. And so I think there's, even though it may not be expressly written in that process, I think in terms of advocating for somebody, either through their attorney, the Mental Health Law Project, sometimes, there should be a way to advocate and get somebody's opinion to support whether or not they need more programming or more support versus not. I think just because it's not written down doesn't mean it's not possible. And people need to start brainstorming and being a little bit more creative on how to meet people's needs. And on a totally different topic, when you said it would be great to sort of think about disability

[Rep. Barbara Rachelson (Member)]: being included in Like, know when we were looking at doing results based accountability, we had this little cheat sheet of like Or when we were looking at racial bias. Like, here are things we should be asking. And I'm just wondering if there's something that would help us to remember to use that lens because sometimes

[Lindsay St. Amour (Executive Director, Disability Rights Vermont)]: Yeah, I I can think about it. And if I think of anything wonderful, I can share with you. But I did bring with us, I do have a statement of our principles from the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights. It's got five basic principles that I hope will kind of help ground your decision making process. So I can leave some copies for you, and maybe you can put it on your wall. And then I'm happy to provide any other information as

[Rep. Angela Arsenault (Member)]: needed. Ian?

[Rep. Ian Goodnow (Member)]: I know I actually have a question, but we're not talking about a bill in particular. So I just want to take a moment to thank you for coming and speaking with us today and for your work. And I feel very strongly that this issue around orders of non hospitalization and around forensic facilities is massive. And any perspective that this committee can get on this issue from all the different angles so that we can get our hands around it is really helpful. So I'm just very grateful for the testimony. And as I'm hearing from more and more witnesses about this, it's just so clear to me that we need to do work on this and try to resolve these issues. So thank you.

[Rep. Angela Arsenault (Member)]: Thank you. All right, thank you all so much. You.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: And if you woulda can join us next. I

[Wilda White (Founder, Mad Freedom; Member, Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights)]: didn't hear it. But Marley, I think, heard. She alerted me. I might have said something relevant to me.

[Rep. Angela Arsenault (Member)]: Thank you for being back. Thank you for

[Wilda White (Founder, Mad Freedom; Member, Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights)]: having me. It's a pleasure to be here, as always. My name is Wilda White. I am the founder of Mad Freedom, a six year old organization whose mission is to end the oppression and discrimination against people based on their perceived mental states. I'm here as a member of the Mad Freedom, actually, it's a member of the Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights, and I'm speaking today, as part of that coalition. As you may know, the theme for today's advocacy is to write disability rights into every bill. And rather than speak on a particular bill, I wanted to speak more about what we mean by that. I'm taking that phrase very literally. It doesn't mean adding a paragraph that says, you know, nothing in this act should be construed to. And it doesn't mean that we need a more a definition section. It means something more practical. Before Bill leaves this room, it should survive a disability rights review, just like it should survive a constitutional review, a fiscal review, and a reality check. Because every bill has an intended effect, and every bill has an unattended effect, something I might call like these edge cases. And the edge is where people get cut off. Disability rights work is really, in large part, the work of looking at these edge cases. Many people think disability law is about accommodation, ramps, interpreters, timelines, paperwork. Those things matter, but disability justice is something more fundamental. It is about how the law determines whose lives are credible, whose testimony counts, whose freedom is fragile, and whose autonomy is conditional. Consider how often disability shows up in this committee's work. In criminal law, where disability is used to justify arrest, confinement, forced treatment, or enhanced supervision. In family law, where disability is treated as evidence of unfitness rather than difference. In civil commitment, where legal personhood itself can be narrowed or removed. These are not exceptions. These are structural patterns. And too often, enters the law only as a risk factor, a liability, or a reason to suspend rights rather than as protected status demanding heightened care. A law can be neutral on its face and still be profoundly unjust. When you draft a bill that expands police authority, but does not consider how disability affects perception, communication, or behavior, you are writing a disability law, whether you intend it or not. When you create procedural deadlines without accounting for cognitive disability, trauma, or episodic conditions, you are deciding who gets access to justice or who does not. When you rely on clinical or diagnostic language as legal threshold, you are importing contested medical frameworks directly into the law, often without scrutiny. And I've spoken to you about that when I'm trying to remove some of the disability labels in the law that remove rights and impose stigma. Neutrality in this context is not fairness, it's blindness to power. People with disabilities are often invited to speak only at the margins after real decisions have already been made, or at least shaped. But lived experience is not decoration, it's evidence. People who have been subjected to involuntary treatment, orders of non hospitalization, surveillance, incarceration, or loss of rights because of disability understand how statutes operate in the real world, often more clearly than anyone else in the room. If disability rights are written into every bill, the lived experience must be consulted early, substantively, and respectfully, not filtered through assumptions about capacity or credibility or other people who are pretending or purporting to speak for us. I also wanna talk about how our money and budgets enter the picture, because sometimes you might think you're thinking about whether something's going to get funded without understanding that this is also touches on disability rights. Because whether the system that is supposed to protect rights is actually funded to do it is also about writing disability rights into the law. So when budgets are on the table, disability rights questions become very specific. Are we funding the places where people go when rights are violated? Are we funding early help or only crisis response? Are we funding access, language access, communication access, mobility access, or assuming it'll work itself out? One office that always belongs in the disability rights conversation every year, especially in the budget, is the Vermont Human Rights Commission. Because the commission is where Vermonters go with discrimination complaints, including disability discrimination. In fact, I think it's one of the most common complaints received by the Human Rights Commission is disability discrimination. And if we're not funding the Human Rights Commission, we have no place to go. When the Human Rights Commission is under resourced, the consequences aren't theoretical. People wait, cases slow down, employers, landlords, and public accommodations don't get timely accountability, and the message to the public becomes, your right exists, but the limits or the lines are too long. Budgets can say we believe in civil rights, while functionally turning the volume down so low that nobody can hear it. So a practical disability rights into every budget question is, if we're relying on civil rights enforcement to solve problems, are we paying for enforcement? And if the answer is no, the policy choice you've made without even saying so, is that violations will be handled privately, slowly or not at all. Another way we see disability rights and budgets is to watch where the state spends money when access fails. If you don't fund accessible housing supports, where does the cost show up? If you don't fund a workable complaint process, where does the conflict go? If you don't fund early voluntary supports, where does the emergency land? Often it lands in places like emergency departments, policing, jails or shelters, systems that are expensive and often experienced as coercive. So budgeting for disability rights isn't only nice to have, it's about choosing the front end instead of the back end. Funding the civil rights and access infrastructure that prevents harm rather than paying more later in crisis systems that respond after harm occurs. Your committee has a particular role because you sit with rights, remedies, and due process. So in addition to policy questions, there are a few judiciary flavored disability rights questions that matter across bills. Remedy. If someone's rights are violated under the bill, what remedy do they actually have? Is it fast enough to matter? Process. Does the bill assume people can navigate the system without help? Forms, hearings, filings, appearances, deadlines? If not, where is the supported pathway? Proof. Are we setting up standards that inadvertently discredit people who communicate differently? In other words, are we rewarding the more fluent narrator rather than the most truthful one? Disability rights don't require you to predict every scenario. They require you to notice predictable failure points and design around them. I'm gonna leave you with a few concrete questions that every that I would suggest that you consider in every bill in order to write disability rights into every bill. Who could be harmed by this law if they are disabled, especially psychiatrically, cognitively, or neurologically disabled. Does this bill expand state power without parallel protections for people whose disability make them more visible, more vulnerable, or less believed? Does the bill rely on medical or diagnostic categories to define legal rights or obligations? And if so, are those categories actually necessary? Are there safeguards to prevent disability from being treated as evidence of dangerousness, incompetence, or moral failure? And does the bill preserve autonomy, due process, and the right to refuse, especially where the state claims to be acting for someone's own good? If those questions are not being asked, disability rights are not being written into the law, even if the bill never uses the word disability. Vermont has a proud history of civil rights leadership. We have often been willing to ask hard questions about state power, incarceration, privacy and human dignity. Disability rights belong squarely within that tradition. Writing disability rights in every bill does not slow good governance. It improves it. It prevents harm before it happens. It reduces litigation, prices intervention and long term costs. Most importantly, it affirms that people with disabilities are full constitutional subjects and not problems to be managed. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Any questions? We're all thinking. Andrew, go ahead.

[Rep. Angela Arsenault (Member)]: Well, I was going to ask if I didn't check, but is your comments available to us?

[Wilda White (Founder, Mad Freedom; Member, Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights)]: In writing? Yeah. No, I wrote two different things, and I was just like, actually, them together. I can put something together, though. Especially the four questions.

[Andrew [Unidentified]]: I pulled out this, we've had some probing equity questions. Discussion has been around the State House for a few years. Was working with RDAP on an equity impact assessment for a legislative tool similar to what exists in the executive branch for all of their budget and policy decisions, but adapted for the legislative process and found out that it's probably less appropriate for it to be in bill form and more appropriate for it to be in rules. And so it's still working on that. But just would love to when I think about age five, most generous assumption is that when, you know, the hearsay exception was created for people with you know, younger than a certain age and people with disabilities, I'll assume I wasn't here when it was done, but I'll assume that the people making that decision thought they were doing a good thing, you know, like a kindness, an appropriate thing, let's say. How do like, I'm and so I'm really aware of how that can backfire and how if you that's probably based on assumptions and maybe done without the input of people with lived experience. So I guess I'm wondering how to safeguard against those sorts of decisions where we can pat ourselves on the shoulder and say, We're doing the right thing. And then to find out, actually, no, you might hear actually like perpetuating.

[Wilda White (Founder, Mad Freedom; Member, Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights)]: Yeah, I think codifying those types of statuses based on diagnoses is always suspect. I know when I testified here trying to ask you to remove the psychiatric disability from that statute, you asked me how I felt about the intellectual disability one too. I said that I, well, I thought it should be removed. I didn't have the lived experience to feel that I wanted to say so. But I have spoken many times with people with intellectual disabilities, and one of the things they always tell me is assume competence. I'm quoting Max Burrows to be specific. He said, Always assume competence. And that law just simply does not. And so that would be my message to you, is when you are tempted to do something for someone's own good, assume competence. And ask yourself, what message are you sending to people who you are codifying in the bill, equating with children? Like what message are you sending? And what effect would that have in their broader lives? I appreciate the question and the grappling with age five.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Any other questions? No. Thank you very much, both.

[Wilda White (Founder, Mad Freedom; Member, Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights)]: Thank you. I appreciate it.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: I only had Lindsay and Wilda on the floor. There are other people wondering, week?

[Wilda White (Founder, Mad Freedom; Member, Vermont Coalition for Disability Rights)]: You've heard a lot from me this week, but That's a first time. No, never enough.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: All right, so

[Rep. Ian Goodnow (Member)]: we'll