Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: The House Judiciary Committee this Wednesday afternoon, February eleventh, and we are hearing from various folks who come here to tell us about their budgets and budget presentation. And I'm happy to have the attorney general here. Thank you very much for being here this afternoon. It's my pleasure. Always nice to

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: be here. We did prepare a slide presentation. This is a slide presentation we always I mean, it's almost exactly like the one we always provide to the appropriations committees. So I don't know if you want to put that up for folks.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Is it on the It's on I think it is on our I can run

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: it, too, if it's easier. I'm just awake.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Okay, all right. Sounds hey, we love us a good slide.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: It makes it I'm a visual learner myself. So if I see a pie chart, I get excited. I'm like, oh, I get it. I even resent that digital clocks are so popular. I used to have a car that had an actual clock face, and I remember thinking, I'm never going to get this again. Enjoy it. They're going stop making these cherries. It's up to you if you want to requested sharing privileges, too.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: I'm not sure

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: if Marcy I'm just sharing that.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Marcy might not have the final slides.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: More than fair. I'll Okay. Okay. So there are two forty slides.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Oh my god. I only have only have

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Which two you want to talk about?

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: This is where my slide show begins.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Okay. Me see. High chart. Oh, right up there. Okay. Page two.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: So this is this begins with a nice snapshot of our budget. Yeah.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: All right, thank you.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Go ahead.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: We start with our mission, which we spend a lot of time working on, so I'll read it aloud so we know it, to use our authority and expertise as the state of Vermont's independent law office to represent state government, protect the public interest in the environment and enforce the laws of equal right and justice to all. And just for your reference, we have asked the appropriations committee for our recommended of the governor recommended budget, plus a position funding a position of the consumer assistance program for home improvement fraud. And we also have an additional position that we have the money for, but we need the position number in our restorative justice unit that was related to the bill that was passed last year. Was that last year? Was just so much has happened. Okay, let's look at the pie chart. So just to explain, the big part of the pie chart is the general fund. That's most of the money. We have a $19,000,000 budget. Let me take a moment to explain something. So when you go over to the right column where it says 147 positions managed statewide, 101 are exempts, but most of those are our lawyers, the assistant attorneys general. We have 97 of those, and then we have classifieds as well. 90 few positions are on the AGO payroll. So of our 147 positions, only 93 are actually part of our office, technically.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: They're in another place.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: We say embedded in other parts of state government. So we supervise them. They are a part of our office, but they also are a part of the Department of Such and Such, the agency of whatever. That is something that is important to kind of keep in mind. We have the tax department, the transportation agency. These are embedded in agencies, but they are a part of the attorney general's office as well. So that to explain the funding difference there and the position number, they're just not technically not in the AG's office. Okay. So going back to my pie chart. General fund is the bulk. We have interdepartmental transfer. That is not embedded. That's things like the civil unit in our office. Civil division handles the defense of lawsuits that are so somewhat sometimes you guys have passed awesome bills and then someone sued over them and we defend them. We are paid by risk management. So that money, the interdepartmental transfer is coming from your agency and state governments such as risk management, as an example. The yellow part of our pie chart is ICAC and MFRO. ICAC is the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which you are all familiar with. And we receive a federal grant for that work. MFROW is a split. Receive a 75% grant. 75% of MFROW is funded by a grant, 25% by state dollars. But so that portion is the yellow pie chart. The tobacco fund is thanks to our diligent enforcement work. We continue to receive a lot of money. The state continues to receive a lot of money from the tobacco settlement from 1998. It's here somewhere, but it's probably 23,000,025 million dollars which we receive every year as a result of that. And we keep some of money to do our diligent enforcement work. We diligently enforce the statute that you all passed in conjunction with that settlement that allows us to keep the full portion of the amount of tobacco money we are allocated in relation to the settlement. And then the special fund is basically consumer settlements, which I will go over later. Our consumer unit every year brings in money through settlements or so far, I can't think of an actual case that went to trial, but I suppose that's an option too. So far, they're settlements, and they're listed in a later slide. We do have an increase in our budget this year. I can walk through it if you're interested. Don't think I have that much time, so I don't want to go into things that aren't interesting to you. But I can explain the increase in a later slide. And to and you'll be more familiar with this than any other committee, but we have two appropriations. One is for the attorney general's office, and the second is specific to Vermont Court Diversion. The attorney general's office has the six divisions. The administration includes like the business office, my office, IT, stuff like that. Environmental and Public Protection is a division that also includes the Consumer Assistance Program I know everyone loves. And also the Civil Rights Unit, which focuses mostly on employment law. And then the criminal unit consists of the criminal litigation unit. Of the criminal division, it includes the criminal litigation unit, ICAC and MFRAW, which I already mentioned. The General Counsel and Administrative Law Division are some of those AAGs that are embedded, like tax, transportation. They also do a wide grab bag of things. Human services, we staff lawyers at the Agency of Human Services. We have lawyers at the Department of Mental Health, at the Department of Children and Families, at the corrections. And then the civil division I already mentioned, we defend the state when the state is sued, in essence. Vermont Court Diversion is, of course, a part of our Community Justice Unit. You hear from Willa Farrell from time to time on this. I know you guys work really hard on a restorative justice bill as discussed just last year, so I won't belabor that. But as you know, that is really a grant program, the attorney general being the umbrella. And then we have all of these local restorative justice and community justice units that we provide grants to. And they perform the work and do a great job doing. Okay, so does anyone have any questions on that slide? I'll just keep trucking through until someone stops me.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Any questions? Go ahead.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Our next slide looks like this. Now I'm nervous, so I'm showing you our next slide. This is the mathiest of the slides. Well, we have one that's even math here, but it really gives an overview of our budget. So I'm going to highlight because I referenced this earlier. Far right, we have our green box that talks about the reasons for the increases. So you can just understand this isn't because of something really that we're doing. It's things that are, sadly, we don't control, the Pay Act, health insurance, the retirement. We are getting a case management system that is new, and we're asking for that to be embedded into our budget. This has been in the works for many years. We actually got, I think, maybe $2,000,000 to begin the process and develop the case management system. When I arrived at the AGO in 2014, we had an outdated case management system that we were told would soon be obsolete, and the company that sold it to us would not be able to update it. We still have that system in 2026. It's very clunky, and it's really essential that we get this. So very, very excited because we've all been putting up with the law manager, which has been a nightmare. As you can imagine, technology has changed a lot since '20 I think we got it in 2013, 2012. So is that through ADS? Yes. So we work closely with them on that. I kind of already went through the funding sources, so I won't go through that with the pie chart. But I just wanted to draw your attention to the top left of the page. It has an overview of the full budget. And just take a note that the personal services, meaning the people, the salaries, that is overwhelmingly the largest part of our budget. So that's a note for you. And then the operating expenses is obviously an important part, but you can see that most of what we do involves paying people to do work. If you have other questions, this green box at the bottom can answer some of the other questions, but I don't wanna spend a lot of time on it because I think there's a lot of other good stuff. So the next slide, we sort of give highlights on what we're up to, and I'm happy to provide that. The first thing that we talk about is when we're in the defensive posture. So we have been defending the large capacity magazine ban and firearm purchase waiting period requirement. Also, more recently, the Climate Superfund Act. We also were in a defensive case We defended the state with a private school commission funding statute. And then the Secretary of State was recently sued because she was following the law and refused to us to turn over the voter list. So we're defending that lawsuit as well in federal court. And then we also find ourselves as the plaintiff sometimes on the defense. And here's just a list of some of the bigger cases that we have going. We sued Exxon and other fossil fuel companies using a greenwashing theory that they had lied to consumers about how environmentally friendly their products were that used the Consumer Protection Act. PFAS manufacturers were sued under a previous attorney general I worked for, as you may recall many years ago, and I hope to go to trial in the next year. We'll see if I get my wish or not, but that is my hope. We have sued opioid marketers and distributors and have brought many, I think tens of millions of dollars at this point into the state with various opioid lawsuits, which we continue. We also sued Meta and TikTok in separate cases relating to harms perpetrated against youth, getting youth addicted to their apps. Monsanto, we sued out relating to contamination of schools and Vermont's natural resources and waterways with their toxic chemical PCBs. And then we recently sued the pharmacy benefit managers, CVS and Express Scripts making up 99% of the market here in Vermont. And we sued them, I think, I want to say that was last, that might have the year before. Since Donald Trump took office, time has changed for my me and

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: my work. So so before you go on and Yes. Just gonna flag something for you and for Todd to to write it down as well. PFAS manufacturers in Monsanto, I'd like to know if our bill regarding statute of repose could potentially impact that. That's h five eighty nine. So I'm not asking for an answer now, but finding that for you to take a look at. I did have one other question before you just Yeah, sure. And also somewhat of a tangent, I apologize, but since I have you here. So the embedded attorneys, how much influence or oversight do you have of the work that they do? And let me specifically, so this morning we had a hearing on the court, the docket, the pilot docket, 3B docket in Chittenden County. But one of the things that came up was when an individual is found to be incompetent to stand trial, in the past, that case was no longer part of what the state's attorneys did, but was passed on to the Attorney General's Attorney Board of Mental Health, Department of Mental Health to kind of follow where that case is going. And I don't know if that still happens, and I don't know if that's just really DMH that gets to decide that or if the Attorney General's Office gets to

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: I mean, we serve a client, but Todd's giving me a look that oh, he's waiting for my answer. Do you want to jump in?

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: I was going to say it's okay. So Todd knows the attorney general's office. I was going to answer.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah, we serve the client. I'll explain. When we're suing PFAS, I'm kind of the client. Don't have a client relationship with someone other than the attorney general. When we're serving a client agency, we literally call them client agencies all the time. See how just flow right out my mouth so easily. It's because we call them the client agency. We advise them. We are their lawyers. We counsel them in that traditional way that you're a counselor. We counsel them. But ultimately, they're the client. They make the calls. And we're proud to represent them. That's why you hear me joke about people like to pit the Democratic attorney general against the Republican governor. And I'm like, hey, he's my favorite client. He's my client. I love him and I love the administration. Stop them and we're proud to do it. So when it comes to policy questions for individual departments, agencies, you name it, that we might be serving as their lawyer, we're still just a lawyer. We don't do policy for that agency or that department. We just service their lawyer.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: So they would decide how to use that person's time.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah. We supervise in a legal sense, and we're collaborative and we want to serve them, but also be the lawyer when that's needed. But when it comes to setting a policy direction, that is not our lane. We're the lawyer. Yeah. You said you

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: had two questions. I think those Yeah, the one was the

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: They were related. Got it. Yes. Okay. So my next slide is a continuation. This focuses specifically It's a continuation of what's happening. What I have found when I go out in the world, maybe this room is different because you're so well informed already, but what I found when I go out in the world is people are very interested in hearing about the lawsuits that we filed against the Trump administration. So I'm here to give you some data around that. We have so far, unfortunately, had to sue 41 times. And that's a lot. It's much more than the first Trump administration. We still had to sue a lot, but this is much more, unfortunately. We are winning in over 90% of the cases to date, whether it be a resolution that is final for the case, or it's just a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order. We're winning in over 90% of the cases. And one of the outcome, I mean, we are restoring rights, which is important, of course. But I also wanted to flag since this is about our budget, that one of the outcomes of the lawsuits is that we've now brought tens of millions of dollars back to the state that was attempted to be illegally withheld from the federal government. And in case you're curious, there's a little chart to describe the most common subjects of the federal lawsuit. Immigration being the most common environmental or climate related and then protecting federal benefits, I think that's supposed to say, then SNAP specifically and LGBTQ rights. What I can tell you about the lawsuits is that the the legal claims that are made are always very, very, very similar. It's a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, violation of various parts of the constitution, including the spending clause, one that I'm sure is near and dear to your hearts because it, of course, gives the legislative branch the power of the purse and many other elements of the constitution. So although the subjects might be different, the legal claims are very similar. And so when I talk about this, I'm always talking about the structure of our government, because that's why the same claims keep coming up, because the violation is of the same part of our structure of government, where we have an executive branch who has overreached and wants to have more power than the structure allows him to have.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: So before you go, I'll let Zach. I think that's a question.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: You, chair. Yeah. No, I just have a few. So on the tens of millions of dollars that you brought back in the state, does that include cases like you previously referenced from big tobacco? Or are these purely

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Oh, no. That takes hundreds of millions of dollars. Right.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: So that's kind of my question. So purely from Trump administration lawsuits that you've put in tens of millions. Do you have a breakdown of what cases those are? How many tens of millions have been? I would love to see that.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: You can. It's right on the website, ago. Vermont.gov. Click on the American flag.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: Great. I'll definitely check that out.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah, it has all the complaints, the press releases and everything in for you.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: And are these of the 41 lawsuits, how many have been jointly filed with other states and how many have been filed with So you're just a party to those?

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Seats? Well, we are a party and we're part of putting them together. And

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: then I guess my other question is in terms of allocation of staff and time resources. Of the 41, again, I don't quite understand. Are these hours that are allocated from your office? Is it persons or bodies that are staffed on these? Could you walk through how many Vermont taxpayer dollars are part of this effort?

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah. So like I mentioned, a lot of the cases involve, almost all of them, violations of the Constitution of The United States. Our constitutional experts in any AG's office is the appellate unit, the solicitor general being the head of that unit. And so our appellate unit is handling this. Our appellate unit consists of a paralegal who does other work outside the appellate unit, the Solicitor General, the Deputy Solicitor General, and then a new person that you all funded on a short term basis who joined us and this wonderful and great writer. Helps with the three of them do appellate. So this is just added to their work, in other words. So they do all the appellate work for the state. They do these cases. They are also assisting in the I talked about the civil division and how we defend cases. Some of those cases involve some of the legislation that you have passed. The arguments in those cases by the plaintiffs have been that the legislation you passed violated the constitution. And so again, our constitutional experts are called upon to do that work. Especially the new person we hired is doing a lot of that work as well. So this was just added on to their work. So they just work more hours. So it's just more part time work than this. It's more work. So it doesn't cost the taxpayers money a ditch and a ditch. There's no one

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: fully dedicated to this, I guess is the point. No, no, no,

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: no, no.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: That wouldn't be impossible.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: In the lawsuit related to Sarah and the alleged not turning up the voter roll or whatever party, who's representing her? Is that you are the It's

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: her Jones office. Well, yeah, I represent everybody. But yeah, so again, it's the appellate unit.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: It's it's

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: back to

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: the appellate.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah, they would. Well, that would probably be civil unit as well, but they have that that constitutional expertise. So we do a lot of collaboration. You see, if someone has the knowledge, they get pulled in. We even have a lawyer with IT knowledge and we keep getting his advice for the IT department. So we have very collaborative approach.

[Rep. Zachary Harvey (Member)]: And I guess one last question is on the 10% of cases that that either haven't been decided or that had been lost, has there been any financial impact to the SAFE?

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: You have 29%

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah, did we lose money? The one that I can remember, there's only one case that we lost outright. Some were preliminary injunction that we lost. The one that we lost outright, which actually was a mixed decision if I'm remembering correctly. I have it in this finder, but I don't wanna waste your time. It was relating to, remember Elon Musk and how he was here and it was wild and then he left? Well, we had sued because he did not go through a process that we felt was appropriate, like the advice and consent process by the Senate and that hadn't been done. And remember correctly, that's the one suit that we lost outright. So that was a final decision, although I'm suspecting it might have been rendered after Elon Musk left Doge. So I'm wondering, I don't know off the top of my head, but that's definitely the case. And I'm not sure if the basis related to the fact that he was no longer there Yeah, or you're welcome. All right. So flipping to our next slide, this is relating to our consumer cases and our consumer recoveries. The consumer unit brings in a variety of amounts every year, and it's millions of dollars usually. It always is millions of dollars if you count the tobacco payments I referenced. So you can see at the bottom, there's a bar. $23,000,000 is how much we brought it in 2025. Since the settlement in 'ninety eight, it's $817,000,000 Some of the cases Is that dinging for us? I'm getting nervous. Do you have to go somewhere?

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: It's from the floor, but we have Why don't we I would skip to the main thing is the request in addition to the governor's recommend because usually if

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: That's page nine.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Yeah. If one is agreeing with the recommend, it's really what's beyond the recommend that we mostly wait.

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Page eight is better. So Rutland in 2022, you all had passed a great bill we loved, which the governor vetoed about home improvement, creating a registry, requiring people to get a contract and insurance if they had a certain threshold, a contract with a certain threshold amount of money. Governor didn't like that. He vetoed it. The legislature was looking for a way to kind of compromise. And part of the compromise was they created this position in the consumer assistance program, the home improvement specialist. We actually pitched that as a, hey, in the mix, oh, this could help. Let's do this. If I had to decide what was the most helpful part of that bill in terms of actually helping consumers. I'm surprised to tell you, I think it's this because we have this person. I wrote this down. Yeah, these resolutions have resulted in recovery savings of over $1,200,000 to Vermaatra's. So this is a lot of money that has been returned. And actually, it's not the reason why it says Vermachers and not consumers is sometimes it's actually the contractor who's getting money from a customer who won't pay the contractor. So the person who's in this role right now is he was a paralegal and he was a contractor. So he's just like no nonsense personality, very good at resolving these. And it's just a really, really great tool to help, frankly, sometimes unsophisticated contractors navigate, hey, this is how this works and come to a resolution in terms of a mediated settlement, if you will, outside of court. So it's working great. However, it's a limited service position, and we don't not only do we would we like that to be continued the position continued, but we also don't have the money in the budget. I just think this is such a great deal. Highly, highly recommend adding this on. And then the second one is related to the restorative justice bill from last year. We created an assistant director for diversion. We have the money. We'd like to convert the position. So it's permanent, needs to be permanent because it's a program that you all created and we're running it. And we said we could do it, but we need the position. This is the position. So that also would be great, but we do have the money this year. So we don't need the money in the budget.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: That's great. Yeah. And that's, like I say, that's really the part that in our budget memo that we focus on is if you agree with the recommended, that part didn't really ask us that much about It's really what is

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: Yeah, so this is it. Otherwise, it looks good.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Great. Any questions or last questions before we do have music that's on the floor for both. Does tobacco ever end?

[Charity Clark (Vermont Attorney General)]: No. People stop smoking. The calculation is made based on market share. In fact, sadly, during the pandemic, we got more money. We had $2,000,000 more for a couple of years because everyone started smoking again. So there was more tobacco smoke. So the more people smoke, the more money we get. It's very sad. But that's how it works.

[Rep. Martin LaLonde (Chair)]: Yeah. So we're going to be adjourned until tomorrow at nine We have a budget presentation from Victims Advocates, and that will be taken up Thank you so much for coming here. Thank you. I appreciate it. And apparently I just shut off. Oh, I thought that was your question. You