Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: And we're back live Wednesday morning, May 13. Happy birthday, great aunt Marie. So h nine forty four, looking at what the senate version of the T bill, their version of the T bill. We were finished up 20. We were sort of trying to we'd finished up with mileage based user fee, at least I don't think we're finished with it, but we at least sort of looked at those sections. And I think we were somewhere near section 24 perhaps. We can plow on from there. I will appreciate it.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Hey. Welcome back. Good morning, Damian.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Good morning. For the record, I'm Damian Leonard from the Office of Legislative Council. The good news is the next few sections just mirror what you did in the House. So section 24 is the House language. This is repealing the outdated municipal heavy equipment loan fund rules since that has been superseded by the municipal equipment and vehicle loan fund. Section 25 is the statement of policy about appropriate warning signage and other road markings for highways and bridges where the portion of the road has a lower speed than the sort of statutory speed for that road. So for example, a tight corner, something like that, where the road itself may be a 45 mile an hour road, but you have to slow down to 25 in the corner. And so it says you have to comply with the federal signage standards and marketing standards to warn people about the lower speed turn. Section 26, this is the same as what was in the house about expanding the secretary of transportation's authority to waive bonding requirements for smaller contracts and temporary stabilization work during an emergency. Section 27 matches up to the house language. This was the updates to bring our statutes into line with the national bridge inspection standards, which our bridge inspectors were already complying with. Section 28, again, matches the house. This was adding the bridge posting or closure violation to a list of traffic violations under title 23. Section 29, again, matches up to the house. This is the changes to the membership of the public transit advisory council. Section 30, again, matches the house. This is the allowance for the Green Mountain Transit Authority to include voluntary member contributions, grants, donations, and other nonassessment revenue in its annual budget. Section 31 matches the house. It's the extension of AOT's public private partnership authority from this coming July to 07/01/2029. Section 32, this again matches the house. These are the limitations on appeals of eleven eleven permits to the transportation board. Section 33, this is a change from the house here. So they've kept the increase in the transportation alternatives grant program, maximum grant amount from 300 to 600,000. They have kept the elimination of the requirement that 50% of the grant fund program or grant program funds be reserved for environmental mitigation projects and instead let them be used for anything. The one change in here is that as passed the house kept the existing prioritization for bike ped projects. The senate expanded that so that priorities preferential weighting is given to bike ped and sand and salt shed projects. So both of them get preferential weighting. Other eligible projects such as scenic overlooks, historic structures, etcetera, would not get that preferential weighting. So it's they've just expanded the preferential weighting to include sand and salt sheds. If I remember correctly, sir.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: If I remember correctly, they were salt sheds were in already.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So that's something new. They're already ineligible use. That was what the original 50% set aside had been for. So they're okay with taking away the set aside, but they do wanna keep preferential waiting. A number of senators were particularly interested in potential potential or already underway projects in their districts that had been taking advantage of this funding, and they they thought that it was beneficial to keep that preference.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: So basically, we have two now, bike and ped and now solvency for the two weighted things with the

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Those are the two types of general project types that get preferential waiting, but there's no specific set aside for either of them. And if you look down the list of projects in this year's transportation program, the majority are bikeped. There's a few salt sand, and then there are some others, historic structures and other things like that. But everything else is the same money wise?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yep.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And section 34 keeps the House language increasing the maximum grant amount for the coming fiscal year to 1,200,000.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: I just have a question on process. So, Damian, we're looking through the changes, but the changes we just discussed in 33, they don't seem to be reflected in

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: the language that we're looking at.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: This is my section by section summary, and I forgot to add that

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: Okay.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Change in there. In the actual bill, when the language comes out of the senate, which should be by the end of the day, we should have something posted to to the web so that it has to wait a day after third reading. So we had third reading yesterday, waits a day. Once it's waited a day, editing will be able to finalize the draft and then post it to the web. But

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: for the most part, what your changes we're looking at are reflective of the Senate's changes, but not this.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah, this was the section by section summary I provided to Senate members in preparation for the floor, similar to what I provided to you a few months ago.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: With the changes or the differences, usually you end up with one that hasn't been we haven't done that yet.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: No, and I can all include once we have the actual official drafts, I can prepare a side by side too. We'll start seeing the We're trying to get a the sections where there are changes. We're trying to get a head start on that. Yep. Yep. So section 35, this was the continuation of the studies from last year's T Bill with the addition of looking at how to simplify setting speed limits and identifying other opportunities to to sort of meet local needs for safety and context sensitivity with downtown speeds. That is kept the same. In the Drive Electric Vermont section, the house had a 192,000. The senate is proposing 242,000. So it's a $50,000 increase that was based on testimony from Drive Electric Vermont that with carry forwards, they needed an additional $50,000 to fully fund the years, the coming fiscal years program. And so that that's what the Senate did here. You will if you are looking closely back in sections four and five, you'll have noticed that we had a 1,700,000 for the leveling. Thank you. But we had taken 1.75 from we'd freed up 1.75 in the bridge program by using TIP funds. That other point zero five is going here to Drive Electric Vermont. So So the sale or lease of the Caledonia County State Airport in sections thirty seven and thirty eight is identical to the house. I will note that now that we are past 05/01/2026, it occurred to me while we were on the floor in the senate that we need a retroactive effective date for section 38. So in conference or a responsive amendment that should be added.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: What would

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: be the date that you're I would make

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: it retroactively effective to April 30.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Just say retroactive.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. So I'll draft that. It would go in the effective date section. So it would say section 38, notwithstanding one VSA two fourteen section 38 shall take effect retroactively on 04/30/2026. The public transit demand response, that is a new section added in the senate. It mirrored what the senate added last year initially, but the amount last year had been $600,000. It was reduced to $400,000, and then the grant terms were modified to support recruitment and retention of volunteer drivers and mobility management activities. Last year, it had been focused on our recruitment and retention of volunteer driver coordinators. So the folks who are actually going out and getting the volunteers and coordinating their work. So this is seen by the Senate as a continuation of last year's work, focusing more on things that will help the program improve, including, for example, finding ways to and we talked about this a little bit last year too, finding ways to minimize trips if you're going from the same area to the same facility instead of doing three or four trips in a day, trying to find a way to do it in one or two to make better use of those limited resources. And then appropriations took the funding out because it's in the big bill, and so it's now just an authorization section.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: And so there's no is it data money?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: They didn't $300,000. So

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Or our general funds. Mhmm.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. 300,000. I believe it's general funds in the big bill. But Logan's nodding. Okay. Good. So

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: It was 600,000 last year.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Initially, Senate Transportation proposed 400 this year after talks with appropriations. And then after it moved out, appropriations reduced that amount to 300 thousands in the big belt in the final edits. And so that's what what's in there. And I think yesterday, we had spoken about getting Ross McDonald in to speak to how that was used. In the works. Our

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: trusted committee assistant is working on that.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. So sections forty and forty one, you will remember a version of this as Representative Pouech's proposed amendment. Senator White proposed a corresponding amendment in the senate. It they took testimony from EV charging networks and the Conservation Law Foundation and others. So they've added definitions related to charging stations and charging networks, and they're proposing requiring EV charging stations that are installed or reconditioned on or after September 30 to make real time information regarding their location status, type of charging equipment, charging speed, and payment methods available, the third party software developers to allow the data to be available to drivers through various EV charging apps. So this basically means that ChargePoint and others will make their data available to groups like Better Route Planner, PlugShare, etcetera, that consolidate the data from different networks so that drivers can find available charging stations. They did take testimony from the the networks. It's worth noting that the September 30 date was added as they were getting the bill out of committee, but the charging networks did not have a chance to weigh in on whether that date worked for them. And so you may wanna hear from the charging networks like ChargePoint.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Damian, is it clarify that it's commercially available EV charging Yeah.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: These are publicly available.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: This is not every EV charging station.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah, so this is not a charging station that an EV owner might have at their house or a business might offer for their employees. These are level two and three chargers that are available for public use by the general public. Okay. So there's

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: not a confusion about that. It's very clear that it's it's offering a commercial service. Yes. Okay. Yeah.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. The the definition of of charging station is one that's available to the general public for regular use, and the updating only has to be when it's available to the public. So if the charging station operator, for example, if you have a gas station that has charging stations available while it's open but shuts them off at night, then they would only have to update their information for that during the hours the the station is open. So President Pouech, Yeah.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: And thank you, Damian, for mentioning the date, 09/30/2026. I think we've gotten some clarification from, I think, ChargePoint who said, if we can make it 01/01/2027, they wanna ensure that all the changes that they might need to make and others might need to make have time. So if we were to go into conference committees, that might be something we would do for the suppliers who bought on to this.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah, and it's worth noting that the standards that they put into the statute here mirror what was required under the NEVI program and then what's been adopted in California that mirrors the NEVI program. So this is not a new standard. It's an industry. They based it on an industry standard so that Vermont is not reinventing the wheel for a small marketplace.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: I'm just wondering about if you can remind me about something I'm just thinking of now. If there's a charger that is in a parking lot, but it is provided by a business owner, is that considered a public charger? Or is that considered a, you

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: know, is it some kind

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: of like both?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So it depends. When we go through the actual language of the bill, we can go through sort of the specifications there. But, yeah, it does depend a little bit on some of the details around how that charger is offered.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Right. I'm just I guess I'm not as all of a sudden, don't drive an EV, so I'm just kind of thinking about how does context

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. So for example, you were to go to, for example, Waterbury is a good example, There are chargers at the state offices there that are available to any member of the public. I forget what network they're on. But any member of the public can pull in and theoretically, they can use either a Tap credit card or an app on their phone to access those chargers and charge their vehicle. There are also chargers at some of the local businesses in the industrial park that will show up on some of the charging apps. But those are restricted to individuals who work at those businesses. So you actually there needs to be a different way to turn it on. You couldn't just drive up in an EV and plug in and have it charge your vehicle. You need to have something to actually switch that charger on for you. And so those if you look at the charging map there, depending on the app, they're marked differently, And there's a warning that you may not actually be able to plug in there. That they show up on the map because at some point they got put on the network, but they've been flagged as, like, not actually available. And that's part of what this is focused on is showing what's actually available. So and that that's kind of what this is getting to. And in those cases, any member of the public could pull into that parking lot and insert plug in their car, but they may not be able to get the charger to work. And so in that case, it likely would not be a public charger required to provide data, and the data provided here is at the network level. So if you're not networked, you're also not going to be part of this. So some businesses have a non network charger that they switch on when the business is open and say, hey, if you're coming to shop here, just plug in. And then when they close down for the day, it's on a time where it shuts off. And those probably won't show up.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yeah. Thank you.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Cool ecosystem here. So

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: when I put mine in my home, I could put it online if I wanted to. And I said, no, don't want it. It's not public. I don't want to show that. When I look at that app on my phone in the map, I see it there. So I think generally public companies who are providing these public chargers, you know, this is what they want to do. This just really helps to standardize it, you know, by following the NEVI and, you know, so that you don't, again, have to have special things for each state or different ones. So ideally, the expectation is a couple of years from now, you'll pull up Google Maps, for example, and it will show you and you say, I wanna see where all the public charges are. Here they are, here's what they cost. These are up and running. This one's not working. So you don't drive four miles out of your way to find one that's not working and you haven't driven by one that's there that you don't know is there.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And this it allows things like sorting by type. So you can sort by plug type. You can sort by speed. You can sort by price, that sort of thing, because all that data would be available if the app supports that. So you can choose your route based on, like, I want to go to the fastest chargers or I want to go to the cheapest chargers similar to the way you might if you were on a road trip. You might say, I'm gonna just stop at the place where I can get gas the quickest. I'm gonna get off the highway and go to the cheaper gas station that's a mile off the highway to save a few bucks.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: So you're saying it requires the charging station

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: to make this information available? Charging station networks. Yeah.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: So the network. Their app? Aren't there multiple they have to make that information available to anybody who's

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: got it? Yeah. The information has to be basically so that one of these third party apps that consolidates it can scrape the data and update it on their app. What about

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: a members only scenario or a manufacturer?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: If it's only available to a limited subset of the public, then it wouldn't be a public charger. That's Not be public. So would that apply to them? For example, you could have a company that does trucking or taxi or something like that where they have chargers for their vehicles only. In that case, that wouldn't show wouldn't be subject to this requirement because, yeah, as a member of the public, even though the plug might work in your vehicle, you can't use that charger. So

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: In the same way, that taxi service might have a gas pump that you can't go need.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Right. Yeah. It's like the highway departments that have a gas pump for their vehicles or something like that. You can't go in there as a member of the public and fill up.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: What I'm sorry, don't want to speak this one too much. What problem are we solving here? There's people that don't want their charter network to be public?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So they're

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: in the business of selling electricity. I guess I'm not understanding why they wouldn't want to make it public as possible to attract customers.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: My understanding of the problem is that it's right now, there's a mix of what data is available. And so this is standardizing the data that's available and making it more widely available in order to create

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: why I guess I'm just missing something else on why the industry wouldn't want to do that. Wouldn't an industry be wanting to do this to get their most amount? Why wouldn't private business take care of this? Guess it's what III don't get what organizes itself based on the, you know, the most to make money. Why are we telling them they have to

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: it doesn't make sense to me. I I I will let representative Pouech answer that. I don't have an answer for that.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: We require gas stations to post how much the gas costs.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Is this what we're trying to do here?

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: And I'm just saying, and if we didn't do that, then maybe it wouldn't be as obvious, like how much gas costs. So we sort of said, hey, these are the things you gotta do. Sort of same thing here. You gotta say, hey, how much does it cost? And is it up and running? So that maybe the company doesn't want to advertise that a whole bank of them aren't up and running. So it's

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: more than just where they're at. You're talking about how they appear, how they post, There's how lot more details here than I'm right. It's

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: available.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: At this stage there's

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: meeting if somebody's currently charging or if they're not working and how much it costs. I'm sorry. There's a lot of I wasn't quite understanding what we were what it was doing.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: So It's available. Yeah.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Available, meaning it's not plugged into currently or that it's not working. Both. Available are this is

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: what the

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: price is. So there's a lot of detail in there that is extra. Okay.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So this basically just requires them to make their data available to these third party app developers. And then it's up to the app developers to do it. I don't remember a discussion of significant costs related to making this available. It's certainly it's not going to cost the state anything additional because the state won't actually be involved in this data sharing. It's just saying that on or after this date, the new things coming in. So they don't have to update old chargers. But as they replace those chargers with newer models or add additional chargers to the network, similar to all the Neve chargers that are coming on, they have to have this data sharing capability. So they have to be basically linked to the internet. So there is a cost there. I think, and again, it'd be better to hear from witnesses from the industry that most new chargers have this capability anyway. And so this is just sort of memorializing what is starting to happen across the board anyway.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: So there's

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: some proprietary issues with these companies sharing all this data. I'm just trying to figure the cons, if there is

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: any. I think different companies share data differently. And so this is, to some extent, standardizing that. But if they've been participating in NEVI or if they're president of California, they're already having to share this data. And then the proposal for this language also came from a group of various academics aligned with the American Enterprise Institute. So it's kind of an interesting regulation to make data available, but focused on sort of a free market solution rather than providing grants to enhance, to ask people to buy, is what this came out of was a white paper based on that. But I would suggest hearing from ChargePoint was the main industry voice. And then they also heard from Tesla. And I can't remember if it was Electrify America or another group in the Senate that sent written testimony. And then

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: CLF advocated on behalf of some of the environmental groups that are interested in more EV adoption. Representative McCoy? So is this starting to get at a centralized place where someone who has an EV logs into charge.com, and it will bring up there was a side conversation going on here with representing White and Keyser. He pulled up one app. Mhmm. Representing White said, well, I don't use that one. I use this one. So is this trying to get to all of these different apps are gonna have to feed into one?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: It's allowing the app makers to continue to compete on providing a superior product, but ensuring that they can all access this data So that they have good data to provide as part of their product, but consumers can still choose to use them. And some of the manufacturers are providing mapping software in their vehicles. And then other manufacturers don't provide particularly good mapping software. So folks resort to an app where you can either use a basic app or you can pay for a premium version, etcetera. And different apps offer different mapping capabilities that folks may choose. Representative Keyser mentioned one app. And that's one of probably dozens of apps right now. So I mentioned some other apps earlier. And they all compete by offering different features. So it's

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: not the goal to have them all feed into one giant app?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: No.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Okay.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. So this isn't taking a stance on But we're trying to regulate what information they're providing to the public?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: It's basically setting a floor for the information that's available.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: I mean, like whether it's in use or not, I don't know. That's necessary. I mean, I waited at a gas pump fifteen, twenty minutes, because gas was 10¢ cheaper. So I mean, we have that. Next available is two blocks away. There's

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: no waiting.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Long lines,

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: no waiting.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: You'd be surprised what's available out there for that kind of info.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, well, don't think there is. Don't think there's an app if I go to mobile and there's like a line and I'm waiting in and I can pull up an app and Chao says, Oh, come on over, no lines,

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: no waiting. I don't think so. I

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: understand that because there are much fewer EV charging stations that these apps are really good to have, I just don't know what that floor should be, that's the information provided. I think whether what type of charging, level one, level two, level three, is what you as an EV driver needs to know, probably the price. And I absolutely feel that it should be posted even if you don't have an app, but you know how much you will be charged when you get here and what type of charging you're getting. Fast charge, not a fast charge.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: And there's already regulation around data that has to be provided at the point of sale around the cost per kilowatt hour.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: And

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: this is providing that data so that in large part because the charging stations are not necessarily as visible or as widely available as gas stations, it is providing that data just so that folks can plan their trips. But already at the point of sale, you should have data on what it's going to cost to charge, whether there's a parking fee for while you're charging, etcetera. So

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: we're going to look about whether we take some testimony on that piece. And side note of the question would be, I'm curious what happens in an enforcement situation doing this. But let's see if we can get through what else is the same as the house and what else is different so

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: we can see what else we need to hear more about. So sections forty two and forty three are new. This would essentially prohibit common interest communities or condo associations primarily from placing unreasonable restrictions on the installation of EV chargers in certain locations, which are essentially either the the portion of an individual's condominium or a limited common element that's tied to that condominium. So and then, again, it's no unreasonable restrictions. So they can say, for example, you know, we can't install a charger there because it would violate fire code. We can't install a charger there because we'd have to upgrade the electrical service. But if you want to upgrade electrical service, then we can approve a charger installation, etcetera. So there are a variety of requirements and it allows them to impose things like reasonable architectural standards requiring use of a licensed electrician, payment of costs for installation, repair, and operation. And also if the condo association's insurance costs go up specifically because of the charging equipment, they can also require the owner to pay that or they can prorate it among owners if multiple owners are getting chargers installed. So it's just it's it's creating a pathway forward so you can't outright prohibit installation of chargers, but you can provide reasonable restrictions on them. Sections forty four and forty five were deleted. Those were the jet fuel surcharges that you've heard about.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: You know, was there a sponsor or a requester that put in the section?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Senator Perchlek and senator White. On forty two and forty three? Yeah. Thank you. Sections forty four and forty five were deleted. Those would have added a jet fuel surcharge. And once that got to finance, they heard a great deal of testimony against doing that and chose to pull that out. Section 46 is a study and report back on something called intelligent speed assistance, which is similar to an ignition interlock device, but for someone who has either had their license suspended for speeding violations or has been convicted of speeding at over 100 miles an hour, they would have a device installed in their car that would limit how fast their car can travel based on the posted speed limit on highway. So it's a GPS enabled device that ties into the car's computer. But this is just a report back on the cost for implementation. Right now there's one active program in the country in DC. Several other states are rolling out programs, but it's still in its infancy.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: You are, guys. You gotta get 16.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Who's the request? White. Senator White.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Oh, representative White.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Damien, was there any discussion about, in this report back from the DMV, asking about the data on the existence of speeding? I think this is the super speeder bill.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: It is. It is based on the super speeder bill. It's really focused on the cost to implement. My sense in the Senate was that they were familiar with the frequency and growing frequency of speeding and the safety concerns tied to speeding violations. In fact, I think in the floor report, they pointed to the road safety concerns around vehicle speed as one of the reasons why they move forward with the report on this, but also the uncertainty because it's so so new across the country. And given that Vermont has fairly limited resources, they wanted to get more information on what it would take to implement this before they push forward.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Representative Pouech?

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, and just sort of add to that, I think there's this recognition, isn't a surprise that the incidence of speeding, it tends to be the same people over and over again in the same way intoxicated driving is and other things. And that after three speeding tickets and you take their license away, they still have to get to work. They still have to, you know, and so this is maybe a way to sort of find a balance there.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Other questions on intelligence speed assistance? So sections 47 through 55, You folks will be familiar with these. These are the changes that the public utility commission requested where they no longer have jurisdiction over these areas. They had originally proposed transferring jurisdiction to the transportation board for everything. The senate went through and made various changes based on feedback from the transportation board and the public utility commission. So in the first in section 47, they've deleted the Public Utility Commission because the federal government has primary jurisdiction over the transportation of explosives. And then our Department of Public Safety enforces various laws on the roads related to that. And then the Transportation Board received jurisdiction over public transit in section forty eight and forty nine. And then in section 50 through 54, they gave jurisdiction to the agency of natural resources over these log drives because ANR has jurisdiction over rivers. I will note that they did not have an opportunity to get ANR in to testify, so you may wanna hear from ANR on this on whether they're comfortable with those changes. And then in section 55, this is petitions for for relief from taxes for railroad in the private railroads in the state. This was redirected to the Department of Taxes who indicated that they were okay with this change. And so that that's those sections. And then section 56, the last section of substantive changes, also new in the senate. This requires the commissioner of DMV in consultation with the AG car dealerships, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation to examine the use and reliability of vehicle history reports. And this was based on this was requested by senator Westman based on concerns from a constituent of his who had purchased a vehicle in New Hampshire where the failure of the vehicle steering system had not been disclosed on the vehicle history report. All that was indicated was a diagnostic was run on the vehicle, and the the steering system failed on the highway causing a almost very serious accident for that that individual. And it appears that the dealership that had had the vehicle at that point before it was then sold at auction to this other dealership that then sold it to the constituent had intentionally not disclosed that so that they could resell the lemon vehicle. So there are concerns about that. I will note that after this passed out of the committee, some of the vehicle history groups indicated that they might be interested in participating in helping that report. So you may want to hear from them moving forward with that. And that is it. I know your next witness is here, and I don't want to cut into

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: related things usually within the agency, the Department of Motor Vehicle?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So I think because this is vehicle history, yeah, the AG's office is included in this because of the consumer protection angle. I know that DMV felt like this wasn't necessarily directly in their wheelhouse, but the AG also indicated that this was not something that is in their wheelhouse either because they don't have a lot of these complaints. And so that's why they're consulting with DMV to provide this report. It's the Thank you. Yeah.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: So I appreciate you getting us to the end. After the bill's letter of state is after it does get finalized and the edited version comes through and it comes over, then you're gonna be working on a bit of a side by side?

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yep. I will begin preparing a side by side. You'll have that either late this week or whenever the bill comes over to the house.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: We don't know exactly the timeline yet of how things will play out.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I'll have a side by side, and we can do a detailed walk through of the sections that are actually different at that time. Great.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: That will be our open I think we have some more left to do. Thank you very much for coming back in and going through that spot. We're going to shift gears. Funny, we mentioned super speeders right in time for a return of Senator Ravlin from All State kinds of questions and information and data and spot and whatnot. Logan, Damian, thank you very much. And Always find this part of company for me.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Hope that I can answer some of your questions. I'm going to log in and share my screen.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: The only thing is it'll be between us and lunch, so you know when the time comes.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: That's probably the most important part of this whole show today, right?

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: I really should. Okay. Thanks, Mollie. Thank you. Bye bye.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: I think that you're on this glass, so you're make it clean. Right?

[Chloe Tomlinson (Clerk)]: Need some help from

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: I'm connecting in right now. Hey. Alright. Am I able to share my screen now?

[Chloe Tomlinson (Clerk)]: Yeah. It should be good.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Okay.

[Chloe Tomlinson (Clerk)]: Is that not up? Yeah.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Here go.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Okay.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: All right, there we go. Thank you for the patience. All right, good morning. I'm Lieutenant Paul Ravlin with the Vermont State Police. My current assignment is the Executive Officer of the Special Operations Unit, which includes the Traffic Safety Unit as well. I've had over twenty one years with the Vermont State Police. All of that's been in uniform, which means I've been on the interstate side roads traffic enforcement. That's been the majority of my career. Span two counties. I worked in Williston for sixteen years, worked in Franklin County for two years before I moved back to my current position now. So I appreciate the opportunity to come down. I know there's been some conversation this year about what has been going on with traffic safety. There's been things talked about, like super speeders we heard earlier in testimony, crash data. I know we've had people down here like Mandy Shatney from Vermont Highway Safety Outreach, VTrans. Her office is great with crash data, the data that they can provide us. I talk to her on kind of a weekly basis about crash data. And then what does our overall stats look like? And then we're gonna talk about that a little bit today, just so we can get some sort of idea what the last ten years looks like. In the middle of that is COVID, in the middle of that is George Floyd, in the middle of that is Ferguson, in the middle of that is society changing, generationally, people changing from 2016 to 2025. So, we'll talk a little bit about what that and what that means, and what we do to kind of address that. So, first and foremost, what our strategic plan is. So, one of the four pillars of the Vermont State Police strategic plan is traffic safety. If you look at the second one down, it's about reducing crashes involving serious injury or death, referred to in my report and today, we'll see as major crashes. We combine those two together. There's thousands of crashes that happen, hundreds every day, fender benders at intersections and so forth, but major crashes where serious bodily injury or a fatality as a result. And year in and year out, that's a focus of ours to wanna reduce those fatal crashes. That's a statewide initiative, right? That's not just VSP, but it is something that we take very seriously. Part of that comes from how do we do that, right? What does 5% mean? And how do we enforce that five or how do we get that 5%? And we look at the four main causes of serious bodily injury or fatal crashes, major crashes, and that's distracted driving, unbelted occupants, speed, and impairment. Those are the four common things that pop up year after year, crash after crash, and what causes these major crashes. These are the ones that change what the dinner table looks like on holidays, right? So, we have a major focus on that. And our efforts for impairment is focused a lot on a drug recognition expert identifying troops that wanna be DREs. A main focus behind that is all officers coming out of the Vermont Police Academy are trained for impairment detection through alcohol. That's your roadside field sobriety exercises, your walk and turn, your one leg stand, your PBT, your handheld PBT, your horizontal gaze nystagmus, those are all things that every officer is trained to detect out of the academy. The drug recognition expert is then selected through an interview process to go to an extensive school. It's two weeks long. Was a DRE for eight years. It's some of the most intensive academic training that I had received in my life, because they're teaching you to detect types of physiological changes in the body, pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, pupil change, things like that. And at the successful completion of that, we traveled to an off-site location, usually in Florida or Arizona, and you have to conduct 12 evaluations, and you have to see as many of the categories of drugs and determine a full report on that. And then you have a final knowledge exam. My final knowledge exam took me about five and a half hours. I started about 07:00 at night. I got done just about 01:00 that morning. And at the completion of that year at DRE, and that's able to determine if someone's under the influence of a drug other than alcohol, someone, the reason that they're driving the way they are is because it's a medical condition, possibly, and it could be a rule out. It could be, we're not seeing the physiological changes in the body that may have led to their aggressive or bad behavior, bad driving. So, you have those categories. You're not locked into saying this person's impaired by drugs. I actually ruled out a person who had several TBIs from Afghanistan, And it was actually a medical condition for the reason that they were driving the way they were. So, that's what DREs are. The reason that's important is drugged only fatalities outpace alcohol only fatalities by double, and has for the last ten plus years. If you look at the stats and we'll get to that chart here a little bit later, drug impaired driving is significant. Majority of the time when drugs are detected in the system, it's THC cannabis here in Vermont. And

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: they sometimes legal drugs, I mean- Prescribed drugs. Prescribed drugs, yeah, yes.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yes, there was a case, and I don't wanna get too far into the storytelling, but I had a significant case at the very beginning of the DRE program. I came on in its infancy around four years of the program. So, counties hadn't recognized yet the DRE program. DREs as a whole is kind of referred to as like a black magic. You're kind of like guessing and years it is. It's rooted in science that goes back to 1979, started in California, but it's been verified many, many times over how the Supreme Court and so forth. In Vermont, we hadn't had those cases yet. In Chittenden County, where I controlled, we had a woman pulled over and the officer recognized impairment and then said, I don't believe this is due to alcohol for various reasons, through the standard field of survival exercise that they learned through the academy. I was called out, I did the evaluation, and I ruled that she was under the influence of a CNS depressant, which is similar category of, say, an alcohol. Blood draw confirmed, there was prescribed medication to show she was under the influence of a depressant. We went to court. Eight hour testimony later to my expertise and validity of the program, it was deemed to be a viable program in Chittenden County at that time. And she was prosecuted for being on the influence of prescribed medication. Albeit not purposely, the woman did not have a bad bone in her body. She just took her medication as prescribed, which caused an impairment to the point where she couldn't operate safely. So we do see that often as well. There is that, I think sometimes it can be a little bit misleading, but on the side of your medication bottle, says, do not operate heavy machinery. And you're thinking of a bulldozer or an excavator. This means a 4,000, 7,000 pound vehicle on the interstate. That's what that means. We say machinery, but it also means vehicles as well. So that's why our focus is on identifying DREs. We have four new DREs selected this year, went to the school age, successfully passed. So Vermont state police is up to 10. And again, all my data will reference Vermont State Police specifically. So we're up to 10. Our goal is to have two per barracks. We have 10 barracks. With this 10, we're not still at that goal. We have a couple of barracks that are not having one in house. Doesn't really mean much other than when a DRE is needed, a call goes out onto their alert, onto their phone, says a DRE is needed at the Williston Barracks response. And a DRE will say, Yeah, I'm available and I'll come in and do it. So, they'll come from another county or local municipalities go through the same training, side by side. So, municipality may come to a VSP station or a trooper may go to a municipality station. So, it's not a siloed response. It's the entire state. So,

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: the goal to reduce major crashes, which are deaths or major injuries. They get lumped into that. And it seems like major crashes you know, aren't going down very fast. They're still sort of bouncing around. I think we saw some charts a couple of months ago. Yet the roadways are safer, I think. I mean, there's less things to run into on the highway that will stop you dead. They absorb the impact. The vehicles are so much safer. But yet, you know, that's not significantly bringing down the major crashes. Are we saying the behavior that causes major crashes is either increasing or hasn't hasn't changed. We think drunk and drunk, impaired driving from alcohol has gone down, can you just talk about that?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yes, yeah, later on, I'm gonna get to that real quick. We're gonna show what the crashes look like over time and what our tickets look like, what our traffic stops look like. That's a big conversation. Like, where is VSP on the scale of what our enforcement looks like, okay? So, you're correct. We see a kind of this, not a significant spike in crashes, but we don't see a significant drop in crashes either. What we have seen over time was a reduction in overall crash reports. And this is a conversation that I had with Mandy in her office. And some of that was kind of an understanding. There's a DMV rule that says if you are involved in a motor vehicle collision, that results in $3,000 or more, a DMV report is mandatory to do that. Law enforcement took that as, well, that's how I can do it too. So our reported crashes were going down, yet our injury and fatal crashes were staying the same. So out of Mandy's office, she's like, Wait a minute, this is statewide. Mandy says, Hang on a second. These statistics do not make sense. How can our fatals and injuries stay the same, but our overall crashes are going down? Everything should fall down the same thing. So it's a reporting thing. You're gonna see crashes. Certainly with VSP, the last two years, my effort was to make sure that we're reporting more crashes, so that that data, so you set road characteristics, engineering, safety, all that, can be to the right people, so that if the road is the issue, if the curve or the sun lighter, we can change the direction of the road and tree cut back and things. So that is increasing. You're gonna see more reporting from state police and agencies as a whole, because that's a concerted effort to get more of that at Mandy's desk. The overall fatal crashes, yes, that behavior, and as I mentioned earlier, those four main causes, unbelted, speed, distracted, and impairment. Those are the four. Unbelted leads all of those. Undoubtedly is all of those. So, we'll move on. So, stops and major crashes.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: You mean it's the number one? If it's a fatal crash, that is

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Majority of the time, it's due to an undoubted occupant. They either get ejected or they sustain injuries, unsurvivable injuries due to get undelted. For state police, this is a ten year look back at our traffic stops and our major crashes. Now, stop, these are the externally generated, a trooper sees a person on the road speeding, waving, aggressive driving, taillight out, headlight out, tinted windows, title 23, all the exception of seat belts, because seat belts is a secondary offense. So, as you can see here, back in 2016, we had about a 5% vacancy in troopers. And the reason I'm bringing that up is because we're gonna get to a point later. We had about 5% vacancies in troopers as of three thirty four troopers on the road, 5%. We had 50,000 or so traffic stops. These aren't total tickets, okay? Total tickets would include the underage drinking ticket you hand out at the party. This would be ancillary tickets that happen afterward. This is from traffic stops alone. In 2017, you see a significant bump, 62,000, and then it started significantly going down a little bit, and then we hit COVID, right? And then I've been asked a few times about policy changes in the state police about traffic stops. How can traffic stops go down? And has there been anything significant? There was never a policy change. And as you can refer back to our strategic plan, there's never a policy change. What changed in our traffic stop enforcement was during COVID. We had categories of alertness, if you will, category one, category two, category three. And this was from our command staff saying, hey, here's how we're gonna respond to serve Vermonters, but also keep ourselves safe. If we had one trooper that was exposed to someone with COVID, which at that time we knew nothing about, and they brought it back to a barracks of 20 troopers. You have an entire county of barracks that cannot respond because they're in a fourteen day quarantine. So, there was a significant reduction. We couldn't go to the barracks, we couldn't be grouped together, And our motor vehicle enforcement was only regulated to the egregious behavior that leads to serious bodily injury or fatal crashes. They didn't wanna see taillights and headlights and registration and expired inspections and all that, just because we're exposing ourselves to the public that potentially could lead us to a barracks being inspected. So once we worked our way through COVID, we started working our way back, and that's about the time I came to this unit. As you can see, the numbers started rising up, and I was tasked in my position in the traffic safety unit to describe and come up with what our traffic and safety enforcement would look like for the state police, taking into consideration everything I just said, staffing, the public's perception of law enforcement, the national perspective of law enforcement, what the public was requesting from their law enforcement, and then what our job and responsibility was to do. We had to balance all that and figure it out. So, that's where our focus strictly zeroed in on traffic safety. So, if you look here, in 2017, we had 62,000 traffic stops, and I had nine seventy two major crashes, injury and fatal crashes combined. And then if I look down here in 2023, we had 24,000 traffic stops, and I had six twenty four major crashes, okay? Now, doesn't go to the unreported crashes that I talked about earlier, because these are reported mandated injury or fatalities. So, with the reduction of traffic enforcement, we didn't see that significant spike in major crashes, which we would've thought through statistics. Like, you're not out there writing tickets, of course, crashes are gonna go through the roof. They didn't. So that gives us, well, okay, what are we gonna do with this data? Does the Vermont State Police need to write 62,000 tickets? Where does our effort go? Should we put our effort into the areas that are causing these crashes? So for example, the effort that's happening right now is working with Manatee's office. I'm developing heat maps where speed is the major cause of crashes in each barracks' area of responsibility. I will then provide each barracks that heat map and say, Here's where you have the majority of your speed related crashes that result in injury or fatalities. And those individual barracks will utilize their resources and say, Hey, this is where we put our Do I sit a trooper on this back road and wait for two speeders, do I put this trooper over here where we have a lot of crashes? So, is ever evolving. Our traffic safety program is evolving year to year. It's not the same every year. And this is why, because the data is gonna tell us where we need to put our limited resources. We have finite numbers. And I bring that up because in 2016, we had 5% vacancy. In 2025, we had an 18.6% vacancy. That averages out to just about five troopers per barracks. That's an entire shift. If you had five people that didn't show up to any job that you think you have, if you had five people of your employees that didn't show up because you didn't have them, how successful would that business be? So, we're trying to evolve and adapt to all those things, and one of them being a vacancy, right? We're getting more applicants, we're getting higher quality applicants. So, it's a constant thing. However, back in the day, when I came on, we had over 1,008 applicants for 20 positions, and now we have three fifty applicants for 20 positions per academy class. So, we're trying to fill 20. It's just gone down, right? It's all numbers. So, that's what we're balancing. This is a busy slide, and I want you to see it here. This is traffic stop outcomes and the major crashes along the bottom. The green line is the overall total stops from the slide before. The red line is warnings that are issued, and the orange line is tickets issued. And again, the blue line is the major crashes. The reason this is important is because we're talking about a balance between education and enforcement. For as far back as I can remember, we had a big study done in the state police by an outside agency to tell us what does our traffic stop data look like in 2011. In 2011, we were at about 45% tickets remaining warnings. In 2025, we kind of went on the bottom side of that 40% of warnings to tickets, tickets to warnings, and that's the way it's been for a while. Typically, troopers write more warnings than they do tickets. I will get from this data, what I'll show you here is I went through and I wanted to have more finite data, but it's just there's so much of it because I had to go through 50,000 traffic stops. But I wanted to show you, in 2016, there was approximately $2,400,000 of traffic tickets written by the Vermont State Police for moving violations. Those were your speeds, those were your aggressive drivers, those were your following too closely, those were your lane change with no turn signal, all those things. In 2019, we had about $2,600,000 in traffic tickets from those same violations. In 2025, dollars 2,200,000 we had in those same violations. So from 2016 to 2025, there's roughly a 200,000 difference in tickets. Now, what does that look like? It's $150 ticket or $162 tickets for the makeup of 100,200 thousand dollars So, there's a significant change in the number of tickets in the dollar amount. But even with the reduction in force, even with the change of how our looks, and even with the reduction of our tickets, we're in that same time, we're in that same dollar amount. And what that equates to is that we're not stopping for those $100 expired inspection sticker. We're not stopping for that $100 registration fee. We're stopping for the speeders. Now, there has been a change in the fine amount. So if you're over 15 miles an hour, that speed fine increases significantly from what it was in 2016. So, some of that is what's paying into this, where less tickets are being issued, but you're within $200,000 of what it was ten years ago with 13% more troopers, and you're talking 40,000 more tickets, or as you were, 20,000 more tickets, okay? So, I wanted that to show exactly what our overall traffic stop outcomes and major crashes looks like from the state police perspective, and how we use this data to guide what our traffic safety messaging is. So, here's our types of crashes over the years. So, this is to your point about what our traffic crashes look like. So, injury crashes, again, state police data only. These are the ones that Vermont stations responded to. As you can see, there was a slight reduction as it goes down, goes down, goes down. And then now we're starting to level out, and then a couple of times we pop back up. And our fatals are kind of in that same time, in that same kind of bubble. And I just attended a conference a while ago, three weeks ago, and the presenter said, Let me guess. Your strategic goal is to reduce fatals and serious injury crashes by five percent. To the class. There's 100 of us in there. And it perked my ears because, well, that's our strategic plan. And he said, Well, how are you gonna do that? What are you doing? How do you control 5%? And so, I'm really paying attention now. And to his point, he said, Let's get to a number that you can control. A number we can control is the speed, right? Which is where this heat map data stuff came from. If you reduce the speed by three miles an hour, you significantly increase your chance of survivability of less injury. So, this is where that data that I told you about earlier is gonna come into play. Our goal is going to be reducing a speed in those heat map areas saying, this is where speed's your problem, and you need to go reduce that speed by three miles an hour. So, now it's not a percentage, it's like, this is a tangible thing. Did you do it or did you not do it? As a Barrett, as a goal, as an objective. This is presented to our command staff, they love it. This is where our next because it's gonna be better than just the number we put up there. And this is a national thing. We say 5%, everyone loves 5%. Missouri says 5%, Ohio says 5%, California says 5%. That's kind of this traffic safety thing. We're trying to get Everyone wants fails to go down. Sir? Do you have any data

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: you know, I mean, there's, you see devices put out there that measure, I think our iceberg had a device, they go out, put it on a road and set it up. And then after a couple of days, go back and say, I think there's somebody at 05:20 in the morning that goes by here at 75 miles an hour. And sure enough, they go out there and they find that one person. Does the state police have data like instruments they put out there where you could say, hey, in ten years now, there are more people. People are going slightly faster as an average overall or not, I'm not sure. And I brought up before, I mean, we want really good loads and we train and we're doing a great job. And I, in the back of my mind, I'm like, we want this goal, but does it make people go faster because now the road's in beautiful shape and you got nice painted lines, can see at night. So just, are people going on average faster?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: There's some anecdotally statements out there saying the interstate's a racetrack. On my way down here, I thought I was gonna be late because I stopped someone, I drive an unmarked vehicle.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Well, I'm always kidding. What are your license plates? The

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Vermont license plates, if you

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: don't even know, it's completely unmarked, but it blew my doors right off. I pulled them over and I was like, How fast is fast enough for you? I gotta get my son to the dentist appointment. I gotta go pick him up. And I said, I 100% can appreciate that. I've got two children too that needs to get to their appointments as well. However, this traffic stop's gonna take eight to ten minutes if you made it there safely. And he got it, and I'm not trying to be a thorn in his side for the day, but just on the way down here, twenty minutes jump. Oh, he got a ticket.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: How fast did you go?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: He was going over 85 miles an hour.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: And was he on the side?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: No, he's on the way to get to his side. I was looking for the car seat in the back, I didn't see one, but with that being said, I don't say there's more speeders. I think the speeders that are speeding are speeding faster. That's what I see out there, because I do have an unmarked vehicle. I get just the seat, I get in the right hand lane, and I'm on cruise control at 66 miles an hour to see what happens. And I was driving down Vogtle Flats, which is the invite to foot to speed, Everyone knows it. And the entire line of traffic is doing 67, 66. I was like, Wow, this is pretty impressive. Then on the way back, I was getting past like I was at a racetrack. So, I don't know that it's more, I just think the ones that are more are speeding faster. Are involved in there. Yes, that's Paul Ravlan's perspective. Do have, to your point, we do have speed carts. That was my job for many years working in Williston, was delivering speed carts in the Chittenden County area and the Mollie County area. We had two, and I maintained the data on that. What we saw on that was, first off, you had to have a speed cut off because people would go for the high score, right? So you cut the speed off, so they don't know how fast they're going, but we recorded it anyway. And after two days, everyone was doing the speed limit. That's what that sign told us. And we gave that data to towns, like Charlotte had, this road is terrible. Everyone's speeding on it all the time. So we put the cart out there and then I left it out there for a week, gave them the data. I was able to break it down in the chart and say, time of day, direction of travel, how fast they were going, day of the week, all that stuff that you're asking for. And after two days, there wasn't a single person that So, what that was, was a force multiplier for police, because I didn't wanna put a trooper down there for six hours to catch the one guy doing 67. But it also said to Charlotte, there may be some perception of speed, and you're right, there probably is some speeders, but it's not this everyone is speeding. Out of 1,200 cars, three of them were speeding over the 85% crowd.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Represent McCoy, then represent Burke, and then represent White. Seven, eight, nine. Sometimes I'll set it at 70 at home on Fridays. People are just, I am the slowest person in the world at 70. Yes. They are just flying.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: I was the slowest today, apparently. Know, I do.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Would you stop me going seven later?

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: What's What's fast enough for you?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: How fast

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: is fast enough for you? Was a question.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: No, I'm not kidding. One car had to be going 85. They just blew on.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Where's gas help slow them down? Not as much as you think it would. Not as much as you think it would. And the unfortunate thing is as time goes on as law enforcement, sometimes you have this perception of like, you can tell the difference between a new police officer and an old police officer. And some of it is because they see what the end result of that behavior is, all right? We had a conversation not too long ago about me being at a fatal crash with a 16 year old kid. He's in front of me, deceased. The phone is on the ground face up, mom, ringing, right? Because she heard, Where's my son? He's not at work. So, that lasts with you, right? So, when we're talking about traffic data, I spent twenty one years on these interstates, we're talking about what are we doing? This is not because I got put into this position. This is not because, Oh, this is part of your job. Have troopers and law enforcement as a whole in Vermont is dedicated to traffic safety. How do we continue? We are the ones that are catching up. We're always like, this is changing, this is changing, technology changes. There's been a lot of talk about automated enforcement. On its surface, great, let's force multiply. But actual implementation is a little bit more complicated than that, as we've seen in this room, in the room downstairs. Another piece of that is Title 23. I've been in this position for four years, and Title 23 has been punch bagged for the last four years. We've gone into that Title 23 over and over and over again. I sat on a committee where we went page by page, and you've probably seen Title 23, it's this thick. We went through violation by violation. We read every single one, and we said, Should this be secondary or should this stay primary? Every single violation was taken into consideration. So eighteen months later, we made no real changes to that. Some things are inherently secondary, possession of registration certificate. I'm not stopping the car to see if you have your registration certificate in your car. That's secondary by nature, because I said, Hand me your registration certificate. I don't have. So, things that are inherently by nature, they stay kind of primary, but they're secondary. But constantly, I'm down in this building testifying about headlights being required. That bill came, that bill was submitted the same week that a five year old was killed in a head on collision from a wrong way driver with its headlights out. The approaching family didn't see the car. If that law had passed, that truck could have driven by a trooper with its headlights out and the trooper could not have stopped it. Tail lights. We're not, oh, tail lights aren't important. Well, it is when it's inclement weather and you come up on the back end of a car that's doing 35 because they can't drive as fast and you're running in the back of it. Alright? Turn signals. Why are those important? Because you just made a lane change and now I'm running into you. So all these things constantly pop up. And we also have the impression that Vermonters are over policed. You'll find a report out there that says Vermonters are more likely to be taken than any other operator per capita in the country. And I'll tell you that, a person sat in this chair testifying to that. So there's a study out there that says that. There's a study out there that there's constant, constant bills being implemented that I'm down here testifying on, trying to make so many more of these violations secondary, which require us to just bypass them. When I testify to that light bill, I say, If I'm at the U-turn, my Exit 12 at 11:00 at night, and that car goes by me at sixty five, no headlights on, they just get to drive on. So, I couldn't stop that car because it's not a primary offense. Just like I can't stop you for not wearing a seatbelt, it's a secondary offense. So, those are the constant things about Title 23 that also play into this. Tinted windows, I think we're still I don't know if we're still settled tinted windows yet. Three years on that. Inspections, registration statement. And I get it, it's a bigger picture than just Paul Ravlin, bigger picture than just state police, a statewide picture, and I can appreciate that. But these are things that law enforcement has to adjust to as these bills were introduced and passed or not passed, and that this is a reflection of that. How do we adjust to this new law that we've enforced forever? And this comes from Mandy Schaffney's office every Tuesday. I don't know

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: if we had one.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Did we get one?

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Oh, I'm sorry. Yep. Representing Burke and Representing White? Do you still have you did that.

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: Yeah, do have, as well, certain comments.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: So interesting talking about speed, I'd rather

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: an electric vehicle down, and you can really save on your electricity by going, usually I'll set the boost control to like 62, it's pretty, you know, how rarely, hardly ever the worst, it's so much, you know, much an advantage. And it certainly gets true with gas, but gas is a lot more easy to access. It's just an interesting thing, found sometimes I'm driving 60, and actually, I enjoy driving slower. It's more calming.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yeah, you're not as anxious, right? Yeah, yeah.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: I have a couple questions. Sure. Those speed cars that you're referring to, those are the ones that are on the side of the road and they tell you how fast you are. So not only do they tell us how fast we're going, but they are reporting the speed of cars as they're passing by.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: They can. Can.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: They can. Not always, but they

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: The ones that I put out, they have a data reporter inside there. There's no camera. It has a little cone for a radar that's in the marked police cars. So, it picks up the speed. That radar gets checked just like you would in your police car, so it's accurate. And it does record the data, time, date, direction, maybe not direction, time, date, and then speed, yeah.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: You were talking about secondary versus primary offenses. So in going through Title 23, is it still a secondary offense to not have your headlights on? Because you were That seems like a real safety issue.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Right, yes. Thankfully, that bill did not pass as introduced, and that was struck from the bill.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: So, it is still a primary?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: It's still a primary. But those are constant bills introduced year after year that, from my perspective, I'm just like, okay, I need to go down and I need to first an observation on this. I need to do a bill review saying, This is why this is not okay. But that's a year after year kind of bill submission. And we're seeing similar things added to things like that.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Well, it just reminds me, in the DMV bill we are working on, there's a whole section about revising inspections, so they just focus on safety. And there were some instances that, just as a driver, it concerned me, for one, whether lights, whether your brake lights

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: It wasn't brake lights, it was

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: backup lights. Yes, whether you had passed inspection if your brake lights weren't working. Anyway, I guess my comment is, I hope that the DMV will work with you and your team to make sure that what they're deciding on the inspection side,

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: in terms of affordability and safety, your department is in agreement on those safety issues. I think that's really important. That, yes. And I can appreciate the position from the Department of Motor Vehicles on having an inspection station owner telling someone their vehicle fails, and then the opinion of whether that is a safety thing or not. No brakes, that's a safety thing, you can't stock your car. Leaky exhaust, carbon monoxide in your car, that's a safety thing. There's a no brainer on that. Some of the things about window tint condition of vehicle, the backup lights, maybe it's not on the interstate, but if I'm walking through the Costco parking lot and I don't see backup lights on and I get run over. So, and I can appreciate them wanting to focus on safety issues and what that is. I think the determination on what considered safe or not is. If you ask my opinion, tinted windows in the driver's compartment is not safe on any level. And the reason I asked that is because when the bill was first, when I say that the bill was first introduced, the night before I asked a trooper, I said, Give me an example of tinted windows, you're a night shift trooper, tell me. He's like, It was in February. I said, it was just two nights ago. I stopped the car and I said, Can you see out this window? He's like, Yeah, if I put the window down, I can see. So, it's like, who's crossing the road? We don't motorcycle in February, but we have walkers, snowbanks, all this other stuff. And the windows are tinted. So, personally speaking, I think tinted windows are a safety issue. However, do they cause a safety mechanism of that car to not work properly? No. Manufacturer doesn't say if you put windows on this, your seatbelt doesn't work. That's not how that works. So where does safety fit into that conversation, and what does that mean? I can appreciate them wanting to fine tune it and not make it so convoluted in where that is. I do appreciate that. But it's just what's the definition of safety and where that lies?

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: I mean, would posit that it is safety for the driver and safety for people around the driver. Sure. Those are, I think, of equal importance. My last question, I'll just wrap it up briefly. So not having an inspection sticker is a secondary offense?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: That is a primary offense. It's a primary? Yes, that was added into one of those bills. So I should preference none of those passed, but those are constant things that come up as becoming secondary.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Okay. And my last comment is just your discussion of speed. I think we know that speed kills on the highway, ski resorts.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yes, just slow down. Thank you.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: President Chisholm? I'm gonna

[James "Jim" Casey (Member)]: go into that tinting thing again. So as I understand it, the federal regulation on this is that manufacturers can only tint to 30%? Yes. Okay. What do you think about that?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Most late model vehicles that we're getting now have that 30% built into the glazing in the window coming from the manufacturer anyway. So there is, if you look at some cars, certainly some higher end cars, you see that there is a tint on that. If you're wearing polarized sunglasses, you can see kind of a different color on that passenger and driver's side window. So there is some glazing to those windows that are already coming from manufacturers with that signage in there. So do you think those are still safe at that level? I would have to refer to the experts on that, but my opinion on the tinting is when I see the 5% and I see the deep window tinting, or I see the windshield tinted, there's a truck near where I live, it's a black truck and I can't see inside it. I don't know how they can see out of it. Every window on it's tinted on it. And so there's an issue when the aftermarket tint gets too dark. So, yeah, aftermarket. What you're talking about is application of after market

[James "Jim" Casey (Member)]: that causes the problem.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yes, sir. Thank you very much. Yes, sir. All right.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Little sidebar to conversations back to the Okay. So

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: I don't have much left. Yeah, I don't have much left. This is the crack data that we receive every Tuesday morning. I'm not sure if you folks can see that, but that's something I get from Manny Shatney's office. And this is showing the last five years, six years of what I was talking about earlier, where we're talking about driving under the influence of alcohol only, driving under the influence of drugs only, and then the type of crashes that we had. And it's year by year, and this is updated as of Tuesday morning at 6AM. So, is the most accurate data we have for state of Vermont data. And then the second page of that is restraint systems. And this is what we're seeing. If you look along the bottom there, at the conclusion of every year, we're looking at our numbers of, in 2021, sixty percent of our fatalities were unbelted occupants, sixty four percent in 'twenty two, and it started to come back down. We're like, okay, we're making some headway. And then 2025 pops up with a fifty five percent. So, we're kind of bouncing around that number of what our restrained occupants, both driver and passenger. So that completes my slideshow, sir.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: I really appreciate your testimony and just being open and saying, Hey, here's the data we have and your experience. In the previous slide, I saw crashes, older drivers older than boats, even that's pretty high up based on your experience and or information from other states and all of that. And just a general, do you think that cause we have all the drivers, that there should be some level of like retesting and verification or maybe a way to sort of, imagine there are sometimes families who are like, hey, don't let that drive. And so is there anything there because that is a growing question, I guess.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: It is, and Vermont has one of the most fastest aging populations in the country. Certainly per capita, we do have a higher aging population. But that is a third rail, right? When you're trying to talk to someone who's been driving for fifty years and saying, You can no longer drive, it's hard to come in and be that person, unless we do have a driver's There is a program out there, and all those come through me from VSP related incidents where a trooper, I just got one this morning, where a trooper goes to a crash, or they go to an incident where the driver is an elderly person and they might have diminished capability of driving safely. They will send a notification to me and say, This person's license needs to be reviewed certainly by a physician, and here's the reason why. And it might be due to a crash, might be due to being lost, it might be due to There's a whole couple of checkboxes they can pick and say, send this in, and then I send it on to the driver improvement program. That person will get a notice in the mail saying, You must comply with this or your license will be under suspension. Now, that physically prevent the person from driving later on? Some of these are, there was a gentleman and this was on the conversation we had with the LPRs when we wanted to bring the LPRs back. I had a case of a missing person in Underhill, couldn't find him an elderly male, couldn't find him anywhere. This was pre kind of cell phone era where everyone had one, we couldn't ping his phone. I put his data in the LPR system. And then seven hours later, Stowe police hit on it. As he drove by, they pulled him over. He had receipts from a gas station in New York. He was gonna drive from Underhill to Stowe, and he ended up in New York getting gas and he was lost. We called his children, they came and got him. They're like, We're gonna tell daddy he can't drive anymore. But what we see is that's a significant hurdle for families too, to have their parents do that. So I think there should be some sort of mandated program. I think that's above and beyond my pay grade on that. Anecdotally, we talk about, oh, as you get older, your capacity to understand and multitask, which is what driving is, gets diminished. I don't have any current data and I haven't researched that recently to say how successful other states have been with that. But you would think that that might be something that would be considered at some point. I don't know, I don't have that answer for you, sorry.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: Representative Burke, can you represent Wells?

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: Yeah, I've got a bill that's on the wall here because a constituent was hit by a developer driving an RV, and he wanted me to put him to build a mandatory vision test, And also, to have some ventilation licensure for people driving RVs. So we did take some testing on these, it didn't get anywhere, especially for RVs, it was complicated. CPL's probably getting to get that there was some kind of possibility of endorsement, but I'm sorry that they can't really get anywhere. I think that it was built in the Senate for the inventory vision as

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: to a certain age.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: And that's certainly a data point where I would start would be Manny Shatteney's office and say, tell me by age, because the crashes are broken down by age, she can provide me that data, and say, tell me by age, but what I have seen is it's not as significant as you would think. You'd say, oh, well, it must be males 16 years old and it must be adults 65 and older. And it's not that significant, but there is males 16 and over, or 16, right? Who are new drivers and they're aggressive. But there is a little bit of rise as the age gets on, but it's not like, Oh, every one of them. So, I think to start with, we need data collection from Mandy's office to say how big of an issue this is from the crash data, because that's unimpinged data, that's data that generates without a police officer sitting in a certain spot or anything, there's no influence on that. It's clean data, so.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: All right, but Representative Mollie, do you have a question?

[James "Jim" Casey (Member)]: What do you attribute that massive 65% drop from 23 to 24 on older drivers, 24 to seven, and then even 25, not bad at 50% drop, Anything stand out in your stance throughout the week? And

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: that's the thing, it's not saying this is the reason why this year this happens. We had a significant spike in fatalities one year, but we had four crashes. It was like, if you look on here, we had the triple fatalities and the quadruple fatalities, where just all of a sudden, there'll be a three week thing where there's a two car fatality, a two person fatality for three weeks in a row, they won't have them for two months. Trying to figure that data out is the constant. We had a spat a while back before I was in this position, but we had three back to back double fatals. And it was like, We need to write more tickets, but that was the reaction, because it just like, How do we solve this problem? And we all know that that's not the answer. You will not find a report anywhere that X amount of tickets results in a X amount of reduction in fatality or serious bodily injury crashes. Anecdotally, I can sit on Wallusky River Bridge in Colchester and stop cars for two days in a row, and I wanna get a single speeder over 54 miles an hour in a 55, because they know I'm there, I can change behavior, but is it a permanent change? Did they speed prior to that? Did they speed after that? So that's the constant moving target that we're always trying to find and to reduce these crashes.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Who's the worst driver,

[James "Jim" Casey (Member)]: an 80 year old male or a 16 year old girl?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Oh, gee, that's another third rail question. I have a 17 year old son, so we have constant conversations, right? I had two boys come up through, I, admittedly, when I was a teenage boy driving around Essex and Westford, I not a good kid. I was just a knee head. And that's, unfortunately, was the freedom I got with it.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: You were loud.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Sorry. But then I see the end result of that. I saw the end result of multiple crashes as a kid, realizing, Hey, this is not the thing that we need to be doing. Then as I get older and I get into this job, it's far more apparent. And we've talked about the 2AM door knock on someone's door and being like, this is why two troopers are standing on your doorstep. It's by far the worst part of this job. And the one that sticks with me the most is a family in a town in Chittenden County, beautiful sunny summer day, knock on their door, come on in, we're just about to have dinner. I'm like, well, here's why we're here right now. Nicest people, they did nothing wrong. But as a result of an aggressive driver, they had a loved one die. And that changes the dinner table. That changes the holiday table. We're here for the Red Ribbon ceremony downstairs. We're here doing conferences all the time. We're here doing care, crash awareness and reduction details, enforcement. Every month, there's a new campaign. We're on TV all the time. Same message. Wear your seatbelt, slow down, don't drive impaired, don't drive distracted. That's our constant message. So we're attacking from both angles, from the blue lights in the rear view mirror, TV, social media, at the fair we set up the table for ten days, come in thousand people per day, over ten days, 10,000 people drive safe, drive safe, wear your seatbelt. The constant, constant message.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: I was gonna ask you about LPR license plate. Yes. Your experience and that would be great if you wanna just sort of, because now we don't use them. Right. Were they valuable? And I guess that would be the first question. Then I wanna talk about automated traffic enforcement. Sure. So those two topics.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: LPRs are valuable. Originally they came out and they're on a hit list and a wanted person drives by, an expanded registration drives by, and those are all things that you could run anyway. So, I can drive down the road and Vermont statue wise me to just sit here on the radio and call out the dispatch, Run this plate, run this plate, run this plate, run this plate. They're publicly inserted in front of you and you can run the plate. LPRs did that for you automatically. And it just popped up on your screen, made a noise, you look over and it says, wanted person, the registered owner is wanted or the registered owner is missing or the registered this vehicle's expired. Something to do with just the registered vehicle.

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: A and they get Or a crime. A license

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Where we used it more

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: frequently now.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: We tracked the homicide suspect up 87 in New York until they got to the ferry. Got to the ferry, they came into Vermont, we don't know where they went. So, yeah, we use New York's all the time through their intelligence center. It can't be just like, Hey, did you see my buddy's play? I'm looking for him. Did he go here, honey? No, it's not that. It's like a real crime and it has to go through a process, a check and balances. The data is kept not regularly accessed through everyday law enforcement. So, you're not just being like, Hey, did so and so drive this? Nope, it's not like that. It's strictly around crimes. Now, New York has a lot of stationary ones. They're at border crossings, they're up 87. We had them mounted the vehicles for a while and we had an armed robbery, burglary, excuse me, bank robbery in Franklin County, and four cars came in from four different directions and they were hitting every car that was going by them get the suspect's car. Like, Yeah, suspect drove by me. Later on, we developed it and we're like, Yeah, this car drove by me. I got it right here. So, they are valuable. There is a significant backside data storage and who stores them and how much storage space do you need. I appreciate all that, and I remember the bill when I reviewed it. Same thing with automated enforcement. Sat in this room, testified, sat downstairs, testified on it. The thing about automated enforcement, force multiplier, and I know Burlington has interest in doing it down there. We tried to do it with the work zones on the interstate. The backside piece to that is very significant, and I'll tell you why. If we had a speed zone, 50,000 cars go on the Moose River Bridge each day. If that was a construction zone, and we had just 1% of them speeding over the speed limit, say 500 vehicles that would buy at a speed generating these types of tickets. It's how do we get those tickets issued? Vermont law has this locked in a specific way on how a traffic ticket is handled. You must verify if they're in the military, you must verify their address, you must verify their registration, you must There's a lot of things that is work heavy. So, said, Oh, let's make it automated. It'd be super simple. The problem is once the camera picks up on it and sends it to somewhere, has to be a law enforcement officer, because you have to verify, are they in the military? All these things that we put in a position of our traffic tickets. There's one suggestion to make it like a parking ticket, where you had an ability to amend to contest it, but it was more a parking ticket where it didn't affect points on your license, it was a monetary thing, and then that didn't require the judicial process behind the scenes like a traffic ticket does. Seems like that might be a little simpler process. However, that's not in the bill, that's above my pay grade there. That is one way around it, but then you do have two systems. You have someone getting a violation for a moving violation, speeding, in a work zone, which is a significant fine, and they get picked up by an automatic enforcement versus the trooper that sits in that work zone doing the same thing. Now the fine is doubled, now they do get points, and what's the equity there? And then also, if there's two types of processes in contesting these tickets, a moving violation, judicial bureau have an issue saying, well, was this ATLE? Was this a law enforcement? If it's ATLE, this angle, law enforcement, this angle, it can get convoluted in two different processes. So I can understand why there was a concern about making it all automated, but as testimony went on, as it went on and more things happened, just loose numbers, we're talking four or five troopers, eight hours a day, all day, that's what they do. They just sit there and do things that get brought in from an automated system. If it was just 1% on the Windham River Bridge, We're talking 500, right? So, it's like, how do we balance that workload to what we really want this thing to do? Many states are doing it. Pennsylvania has a very successful place. I think Maryland has a very successful thing. Burlington has a significant interest on the noise abatement and the red light runners down there. I'm anxious to see how that process works. I know that part of the bill that was introduced this year was to make it so municipalities can use it as well. So, I'm anxious to see how it works. And I think if you use force multipliers, you might get more compliance. At first, you're gonna get that spike and everyone's gonna know it's there. And then you'll get this kind of compliance based around safety, not revenue generation, right? We don't wanna say, oh, we're gonna generate all this revenue at this one stop sign. We want that person to be able to cross that crosswalk on Church Street safely, right? So, I can appreciate it. And I've investigated crashes where workers were struck and killed on the interstate. So, I know the significance of being safe in work zones. So, I appreciate the interest in that. I think there has to be some fine tuning to get it to where we need to be operationally. And that makes sense. As I talked about, we're carrying almost a 19% vacancy, and we're talking to taking five, six, seven, eight troopers off the road, just to look at things that were sent into them for speeders on the interstate. What are we not gonna do if we're sending those troopers sitting there? Long way around the horn, know, that's kind of

[Phil Pouech (Ranking Member)]: I appreciate it, but you do mention the force multiplier and data we saw a couple of years ago show in Connecticut, at least when they set this up, people started to slow down. Sure. And they even slowed down another construction, measured it and they showed more better compliance even when it didn't say cameras here. Sure. People start to feel

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: It would be aware, yeah, absolutely. Okay, thank you.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Yes. Motorcycles. Motorcycles. I guess you're only operating them for maybe twenty to twenty five weeks, right? But maybe less twenty, so you're pretty much shown historically every week all summer somebody might die on an oversight. Whether they're a resident or visitor. None of that applies to this, right? This isn't just Vermonters, this isn't

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: all of It's a motorcycle fatality.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: In all these stats, whatever happens on the road, doesn't matter if they're a resident or But a the motorcycle is pretty much you're gonna have one every week in the summer somewhere in the state. Is that what that tells you?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: That's what that tells me. Just

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: the way it's been and the way it's

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: saw a significant What we saw was like when someone mentioned gas prices earlier, there's a change in gas prices. We saw a huge influx of motorcycles. They drove the scooters, they drove the electric bikes, and they drove more motorcycles throughout there. And that was like, wow, we think because gas prices are up and they're driving the motorcycles. And then I still shake my head because I see a person in front of me on a motorcycle, weaving in their own lane, revving the engine really loud. I'm like, Wow, my friends did that when they were 16. And now here I am at 50, and someone's doing the exact same thing. It's almost like it just passes on year after year, that person's like, they're the first ones to be doing this. It just happens every year. We see aggressive motorcycle drivers. Will certainly on the interstate, passing aggressively, driving aggressively, weaving in and out of lanes aggressively. We've done some work to try to get messaging out there about sharing the road with motorcyclists, look twice, that type of thing, so that we had one fatality at the end of summer last year, where wasn't the motorcyclist's fault, driving along, doing their own thing, and the car pulls out from the side road and the motorcyclist and the driver didn't see me. I didn't even see him. And by all intents and purposes, the motorcycle was doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. Driving the way they're supposed to be wearing, or driving the way they're supposed to be driving, wearing the safety gear they're supposed to be wearing, but yet a car pulls out in front of them and it's no match, right? So, there is both of that. It's not just the motorcyclists, although we do see aggressive behavior from them, but there is a responsibility to a person driving a motor vehicle, like a car or a truck, to take that extra second and be like, Wow, this is a straightaway. Yes, I see a single headlight. Is there a car down the road doing 55 or is there a motorcycle doing 65, 70? Can I really see it? So, we constantly do that messaging. Our last safety campaign, which was last month, we held it at Cyclewise down on Route 7. Purpose, it was a distracted driving campaign. And we purposely held it at Cyclewise, when the owners of Cyclewise come out and have a piece of conversation about looking twice for motorcyclists, they're big motorcycle enthusiasts, they sell motorcycles. It was just getting that message across and being like, it's not just motorcyclists. Some of these fatalities are motorcyclists doing the right thing, but still becoming a victim of crash.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Autonomous vehicles, AI, driving, how's that gonna impact when things do or don't happen? Is the, you know, such as eventually we'll get here

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: and deal with it, it's very

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yeah, I mean, I'd say

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Stay up on what's coming and

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: I mean, I think if Henry Ford looked at cars today, he'd be like, what the heck are we doing? Right? So I think, technology is gonna change how we do enforcement. Sometimes it'll make us change faster than we want to change or how we can change. The automated was driving home on a vacation trip the other day, and the person's driving exactly the speed limit in very popular electric car, I would say. And I'm like, this is perfect, right here, exactly the speed, no fluctuation. So, I go around and I looked and she was knitting. The car was driving toward her and she was knitting. So, I was like, wow. We had a law that says you cannot do anything behind the wheel that interferes with the safety mechanisms of the vehicle. That was geared towards the dog on your lap, or the bowl of cereal, or the makeup, or the tie fixing. I didn't think of a knitting, but that's what was happening. The car was in this lane, 65 miles an hour right there, and I just looked in and that's what they were doing. So, I think that's TBD, to be decided on how that's gonna be with positioning behind the wheel. And technically that's a violation, title is only free violation. Like you're not in control of your vehicle on how I would interpret the law. But the automated systems say that she's been, was she doing anything wrong? She was not weaving, she was 65, straight ahead. So that will be something that will probably be a Title 23 review about positioning behind the steering wheel. What does that mean? And control of the safety mechanisms of your car. What does that mean? And yes, with AI and Google Maps and all these new cars, certainly to your point earlier, sir, was the cars are being made safer and the technology, and does that create this vision of, know,

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: what am I talking about?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Invincible. Invincible, yeah. Where they can go fast and they can take chances and drive that way. So, yeah, it's a real question.

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: So, hope we got one more.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: Two questions. We saw some data earlier this session on fatalities in seatbelts and saw other states where not wearing a seatbelt was a primary offense. The data supported that they had less fatalities. It looked like made me think that have we considered not wearing a seatbelt to be a primary offense versus a secondary offense? What are your thoughts on that?

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Certainly the data that's presented to us that the way that the safety mechanisms work in your car, they work as a system. And if one piece of that system isn't working properly, then the whole system fails. So, example, there are some vehicles out there where if the seatbelt's not engaged, the airbag won't engage. And that way you're not being thrusted into an airbag that's coming at you at hundreds of miles an hour. So, it's not just, I don't have a seatbelt on. It's like, I don't have a seatbelt on and I disabled my safety mechanisms in my car. So, if I wear a seatbelt, now that airbag's gonna come out, the knee bag's gonna come out, the side impact bag's gonna come out, and I'm now in this cocoon of airbags that could increase the chance of survivability and less injury. One thing that we did take into consideration, we did this study a long time ago, was on the Musko River Bridge, we averaged 300 crashes a year. We did a survey monkey to the masses. We said, Do you avoid traveling down to Burlington on the interstate, knowing that there could be a crash and you could be delayed? Overwhelmingly, people said yes. So, people are avoiding going to a financial district of Chittenden County because they might be involved in a crash and delayed for forty five minutes. So, not only does it have a significant increase on the vacancy at the table, but it has a significant increase on, when we talk about it, retail downtown, it has significant increase on employers. When you're losing an employee to your business for an hour, hour and a half while you're stuck in traffic, does that reduce your ability to successfully do your business? The answer is yes. So, it's not just we're losing someone. That is significant enough. That's tragic. But then you look at all these ancillary things that happen after that, losing retail value downtown Burlington, losing employers. We're losing the ability of our car operating safely. So, we're taking a lot of things out of the picture of not having a seatbelt violation. However, it is my job to enforce what laws are there. A seatbelt is a secondary violation. When we see that violation, we do ticket it. I do have data from an occupant protection grant that we have, and it shows, I don't have that here, unfortunately, but it does show troopers are writing that ticket when they stop the vehicle for something else and the person's not belted. That's how that secondary violation works. They have to be stopped and ticketed for a primary offense for that secondary offense to take effect.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: And my other question, and I see we're running up on time, but not having an inspection as a primary offense, registration, I don't know if you can see it now, it's in all of the stickers, we're seeing declines in people complying with So inspections and when your officers are pulling people over for other issues, are they ticketing for no inspection or registration? Do you feel like there's a way to

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: Yes, so

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: just

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: go in the right

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: the vehicle not being inspected, the number in 2025 was in the 2000s, 2100 for vehicles not being inspected. So that's still happening.

[Mollie S. Burke (Member)]: And was that ticketed or was that noticed?

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: That was ticketed. Ticketed.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Yes. So So a lot of times that by nature now has become secondary just because to your point, not to date myself, but back in the day, if it was red or yellow or green, I knew it was either that year or not. And then it had a big even number that now it's one single color and it's whatever number of that month, right? Before it was just even numbers. We've had some fraudulent ones, it's in the barracks of 11 and a nine, like someone didn't realize that they were all even numbers. But now it's every month and it's one color. So it's much more difficult to be proactive with those, certainly at highway speeds, secondary roads, lower speeds, and then certainly after the stop, when you can reach up and look and be like, Oh, your vehicle is not inspected. So, we're around 2,000, 2,125, but I don't know

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: the number off the top of

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: my head what it was prior to the change. So, that's kind of all I have. I know we are just part of a system, the traffic safety system, we're the enforcing piece of it, right? It goes to judicial court, starts here with bills on the wall, we enforce it, goes to court. I know it's not just the VSP thing. I know it's not just a legislative thing. It's everybody doing the traffic safety thing. So, I appreciate the opportunity to come down and talk to you about it and offer up some data and some opinions. But if there's anything else ever, don't hesitate to reach out, but you do have seventy days.

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: That's what I would say, Lieutenant Rutland, we appreciate you very much all the time you have been in committee and all the service, and in case the rest

[Timothy R. Corcoran II (Vice Chair)]: of the movers didn't catch that little part, there's

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: a good chance you won't see Lieutenant Rutland and see if you were to return next year. Wish you the best. Yeah. Whatever it is you do next, it'll be all you do stuff. Yeah.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: Thanks. I I certainly appreciate it. It's given me a newfound respect for the process, and I and I just opened my eyes, so thank you.

[Damian Leonard (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Thank you very much.

[Lt. Paul Ravlin (Vermont State Police)]: You're certainly quite

[Matt Walker (Chair)]: We are adjourned.

[Kenneth "Ken" Wells (Member)]: Opened our eyes.