Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Good afternoon. Welcome back to the Senate Committee on Government Operations meeting of Friday, 03/17/2026. Doctor. Anderson has joined us from Legislative Council, and I know this will maybe spring a bit of surprise on you, but we'd like to go over the Burlington charter if you, in fact, have language that we can all agree on. As I remember, you and senator Vyhovsky had worked on some language that would have matched the intent of the city of Burlington's leadership in terms of being able to redo their boundaries. Does this not ring a bell? You're looking rather through a slide.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: I think he's trying to find it on this.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: I am. We could take that up second if you want. Do the Bennington charter first. Okay. Does everybody have the Bennington charter? It's a one page bill, H690. Have testimony from representative on Thursday about why they wanted to do this. I've asked for representative Tim to come in twice, we still have yet to see him. So I guess we're just gonna assume that things were great. And I had the vote total written down in case we wanted to vote it out. By the way, senator Clarkson will not be with us for the rest of this week, so we should pass every bill and make her the reporter. Her So the bill was voted out twelve thirty one to seven ninety nine at town meeting of 2005, and then the vote committee was ten zero one. It was a voice vote with no objections. So Tucker, if

[Tucker Anderson (Legislative Counsel)]: you can let us know how this came about and any information you care to pass on. Sure. So good afternoon, Tucker Anderson, Legislative Counsel. You should have in front of you, six ninety four as passed by the house. H six ninety four amends one section of the town of Edmonton Charter, section four zero six related to the removal of the town manager. Currently, under this section, the manager may be removed on ninety days written notice from the select board. This is modified under age six ninety four to reflect that unless expressly modified by contract, then the manager may be removed on ninety days written notice. This effectively allows the town, through the contract with the town manager, provide alternate notice terms for when the manager may be removed.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Again, it's not strictly complicated at all. Can I just ask kind of a, I like grammar a lot? I used to be able to diagram sentences. Do you all remember doing that Probably you guys are, you know, on the school

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: with Yeah.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: The article hanging out there and the verb and then the slash points and all that stuff. The preposition on seems a little bit awkward to me. Why not with? And I don't mean to question the editor's choice of word, but usually you say with such and such notice, not on such and such.

[Tucker Anderson (Legislative Counsel)]: One thing that I would note is that we have a much lighter touch with how we alter and edit the charter Oh, okay. Municipal corporations. So what we do is if there's anything that is completely out of compliance with the drafting manual, for example, the way the subdivisions subsections are organized, or if there are terms used in charter that are no longer appropriate or don't fit the general assembly style, we'll change those. We'll try to fix any obvious typographical or grammatical errors, and of course, we'll flag legal and constitutional issues ahead of time for the sponsor, but something like this might not get flagged by the

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Yeah, it's just so. When Sandy read it, I went, No, that's not right. It should be with Novus, not on Novus. But okay. Any questions for Todd? Apparently, not going to see Jimmy Parkland, so we have the vote from town meeting a year ago. Mister chair. Yes. I'm sorry.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: I don't wanna say I reached out to Tim, to representative Portman, and he said that representative Will Greer is taking the lead on Bennington charter changes. And I said, if you wouldn't mind letting the committee assistant or the chair know, and he said he will email you now. Oh. So

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Okay.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: Wanted to communicate that I don't think he was purposely avoiding us. There may

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: be imply that, Tim, if you're listening listening at some future date.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: He wasn't

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: avoiding.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Okay.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: It seems maybe a miscommunication well career has been taking over. Okay. We wanted to hear from a state rep.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: That might be who we ask.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Do we need to?

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: I feel this is pretty low risk as a vote on my part, but Yeah. So I don't feel called to ask any questions. Usually, we get, like, the vote numbers and the percentages and all that.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Oh, yeah. We do.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: So if you yeah.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: Did representative indicate why this charter came to be?

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: She did, but I can't remember what she said.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: She said they had changed it because both John and I were like, seems like there may have been something hinky that went on. Right. And it sounded like, no, this was just their first time that they had had a contract change since they've had, like, a town manager who would want a contract. Their last guy was there for fifteen years or something. So they were just trying to update what their contracts were saying when they

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: were hiring for an initial decision. Okay. So they're not attempting to alter the contract during the term of the contract. They're looking to modernize and set things up

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: to be better going forward.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Member)]: It sounded like the contract they had with their new town manager already reflected the changes we're seeing to charter. So, they are trying to change their charter, but I don't think it changes the contract, but that's

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: a question that we'd want to ask for. Why do they need it in charter if it can just be in the contract?

[Tucker Anderson (Legislative Counsel)]: Because the charter would be binding on the contract anyway, because it specifically requires a piece of state law to deny it against the police. So you're giving them the right to negotiate a future voucher, I just need to work on this period.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Okay, well, I guess we can wait another day or two. What isn't gonna be the. Okay. Any other questions about the Bennington? And I think there's more than this with the Bennington charters, but this was one that we got early on. Now to Burlington, and this is 05/2008, which has to do again with the ability of the city council from time to time changed the boundaries of the election areas in order to provide equal division of population among them in accordance with data produced by the US Census Bureau. We talked a lot about this when we first took it up, and I'm not sure that we came up with the exact language that is gonna satisfy the city council members. Didn't they testify yet?

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: They did, and I believe that at the end of the testimony where we came to was an agreement on what they were trying to do and that the language they sent us, in fact, did not do that. And we had language in front of us that we discovered also didn't do what they were trying to do. And now I'm I am we're waiting for new language that does. And I suspect, and legislative counsel can correct me if I'm wrong, that in the flurry of crossover charter language, we may have fallen to the bottom of this to do list.

[Tucker Anderson (Legislative Counsel)]: That is correct. So with advance apologies that I was operating Sorry. The triage system, and I didn't know that this was coming out today. Have not yet implemented the incredibly wise idea that Senator Vyhovsky had come up with and left me a very pleasant voice message one afternoon. But to bring you back to the solution that you started, you had a proposed amendment, which in draft 1.1 eliminated the one seventy five implementation, and added in language that required that election area boundaries would be changed whenever there was an unconstitutional division of population. So you had a triggering event when there would be a mandatory duty to change the election area of that business. So, to work through this section, the city council is granted the discretionary authority to change election area boundaries from Tutland. They are mandated by this language to change the election area boundaries whenever there's an unconstitutional division of population. The concern that came up was whether this is something that would require constant change. At least that's what I'm reflecting. Every time there will be some sort of shift. I am happy to repress whatever language the committee wants to address these concerns and add that acceptance clause in. Probably didn't need twenty minutes to get you addressed.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: We don't need you to go today.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: And I'm happy to, if it is helpful to come find you and spend fifteen or twenty minutes Checklist the we

[Tucker Anderson (Legislative Counsel)]: put together of do you wanna do this, this, this, or this? If you do that, do you wanna make this adjustment?

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: Yes. I'm happy to do that whenever it fits into your triage schedule, because I know you're still probably dealing with some crossover chaos.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Yes. Do we wanna have city officials come back to us?

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: What I promised the city officials is once we have language that Tucker and I said this does what the city asked us to, that I would send it to them to approve. Okay. I did not promise that we'd bring them back in. Simply that I would give them the language.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Probably don't need to? I don't think we do. Okay.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: But I will let Tucker tell me when his schedule is quiet enough, and then we will work on the language. I will get the city officials.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Okay.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: And I'll let you know when we're ready.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Okay. Thank you. That's all we had. Tomorrow, again, as I mentioned, I don't know if we were online or offline, the OPR bill, we're gonna begin to look at it. We don't have possession of it yet, which is why there's no number on the agenda, bill number. I didn't know that till this morning, but until we have jurisdiction in possession of the bill, we don't put numbers of bills on the agenda. We can refer to what they intend to do, but we can't put a number. I learned that from Lynn this morning, so just no. And then, similarly, an acclimated economy and regional governance study committee. We were gonna take that up on Thursday. That has been, I think it was on notice today in the House. The OPR bill was up for, I think, third reading today. So we will have that very, very quickly, we'll put a number and then begin to take testimony. Kate Nugent, who was the reporter on the bill, come in and let us know what's in the OPR bill. What I understand is there are no new fees, but there are some other changes that Secretary of State's Office want to enact.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: Does no new fees mean no change in fees?

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: I believe that's what I learned.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Vice Chair)]: So it's like there is a difference between a new fee and an increased fee.

[Sen. Brian Collamore (Chair)]: Correct. And I could have wrong information or I could have interpreted that incorrectly, but we'll see when we pick it up. And that might be a fairly dense bill. I haven't looked at it, so I don't know. But we'll do a walk through tomorrow with representative Nugent, and then we'll see. I there's a lot of TBDs in this well, not so much anymore, in this week's agenda because we didn't get a lot of stuff over from the other body yet, but we will. Okay. I guess you all can enjoy an early afternoon, unless someone else has something else to bring up. I don't know where and this is senator Clarkson's last day for a week. We won't see her again until a week later. So with that, mine will adjourn for the day and see all the