Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: We're live. Alright. Good morning. We are back in senate judiciary. It's January 29. We had some scheduling agenda items shipped around, we have some time to get a quick update in Moritz about some of the changes or a discussion that we've had regarding 208 or 2 no. You're on 209. 29. 209. Sorry. So we will hear about that, and then we will go to the. So, Dolores, you'll be Alright.

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: Good morning. We're excited to move the office of council. So I don't have an amendment today. I'm here to kind of see what you all want. I think we need to make some decisions about what locations you definitely want to include and definitions. You have Elizabeth St. James here early in the week about schools, how you wanna define schools. So once they get clear direction from the committee on, you know, what locations are and what's included next week. I think a draft would be finalized and then we can discuss with them. But that's kind of why I'm here to still be making last few different points about what to and I'll take.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I'm just now he's not folding here. Senator Jose.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: I thought we still needed to hear, you know, a couple more witnesses to make those decisions tougher and because that's you're talking about 02/2009?

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: Yes. So I spoke to Tucker, he's busy at the moment, spoke with him last night, about the building's definition, the state county municipal buildings. It's kind of as it looks that a building that is owned by the state, county, or municipal government, which can be pretty broad, would be included. We're also probably good schools. A lot of public schools are owned by the state, obviously. I do have one public building definition I can share with you that actually uses the phrases state municipal county building within the definition. So we don't really have an expanded, detailed definition of what a state building is. I think just using state, state, school county building, if that's what you all want to cope with, makes it pretty clear what is and what is not included in the But going to testify, I'm sure, meeting up next week.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah, maybe, because I think, I know I have some specific questions, thinking about, I've seen about Essex specifically, as we were talking about child and parent summer camps, occurred to me that Essex owns a pool and some parks. Are those buildings?

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: So if it is owned by it's no, that's not a building. And so one of my suggestions, that I was gonna get to here is, you know, in the current ville can I share my screen? It helps you, you can see what I've been thinking. I just have the bill as introduced as a refresher. There it is. I'm gonna skip to page two. What we'll be looking at here. I've talked to the committee how this language works for court proceedings. You typically have a time and date. You're going to court, either because you have a hearing or you're a witness to a court proceeding. I don't know if that language works when you apply it to a state, county building, a school, etcetera. So one of my thoughts was that instead of, I think maybe that language can remain for court proceeding, and maybe you build out the language for these other sensitive places by having maybe a radius of feet, a thousand feet, let's just say for example. So in your example, while a park is on a building, it may or may not be included within 1,000 feet that that park is attached to or a nearby state building. However, if you want parks to be included, you would want to specify a public park right in one of those locations in Statue. So that's one of my things for you to think about is, would that maybe make it easier for the police to understand, you know, it's state buildings, but it's also a thousand feet within a state building, so there's some kind of form of just knowing how this could be used. We have

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: a follow-up on the consent of her.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah, I'm happy to chat with Tucker offline, or both of you, if that's easier. But my concern the and with the traveling to entering, remaining back or returning from, in particular with relation to schools, is, like, kids on the school bus, parents driving their kids to school in the morning. Like, there is some really finite time you're supposed to be at school, time you're picked up from school. And the other one is around the medical facilities. Like, if I'm in an ambulance on my way to a medical facility or I'm being, you know, driven to the emergency department, like, it's pretty clear, like, that's what's happening. And I also hear senator Mattos' concern and and I around, like, okay. So I have a doctor's appointment at 02:00, but I got up at eight, and I went to the store, I went to hear it. At what point am I traveling to? So, like, I hear those concerns, but I don't think just saying a thousand actually captures some of my concern, and I don't know that it actually fully solves your concern.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: No. Yeah. So

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: Just an idea. Yeah. Happy to know. Like, you all would would refer.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Just I a quick response, at least to the education piece, one of the definitions that DEP provided us is on the last page, very bottom where it says transportation provided by an educational institution, so I think that would cover school buses.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: But it wouldn't cover parents driving their kids to school or kids just walking to school, which when you see that in instance with a child walking to school, that was being followed by masked men in an unmarked car.

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: I think

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: the other piece also is that we have to consider the defensibility of the bill, because theoretically we could say to and from all these different areas, we can increase the radius to 5,000 feet for a mile or five miles. I'm looking at it from the lens of trying to attack this bill. At a certain point, after certain thresholds, it will turn into something that does constructively interfere entirely with the federal government's enforcement of its laws. And so that's the concern I have as to how far we extend this umbrella, and if it gets to a point that it crosses a certain threshold, that it brings in the intergovernmental immunity issue. So that's what I'm thinking about. Just a comment,

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: Senator Baruth. And I'll echo that into the RFI. I've got wild about the idea of

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: of radius around buildings. And

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: I

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: think in general, we have a piece that's been in statute that's been successful from what we know, and that is court proceedings. And the language of going to, attending, or returning from has been instantiated. So we might have made the same objections about that. What if somebody drops, get off from school and goes to the supermarket, blah blah blah, and then goes to court? But we haven't had issues with that language. So I guess I would say keep it simple, retain that language, add the list that we want to add, and President Quartz will be able to determine if somebody is attempting to go into their way to work and they get caught somewhere far from one of these races, trust that the court would be able to confirm and plead the battle to the rest of night. The other thing I would say is that I believe schools are municipalities, school districts, are municipalities, and we're walking statute. Whether that helps us or not. I I do think schools should be listed correctly but if you say municipal buildings, I think they come on the back, I think. Is that true?

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: I don't know about the buildings, but it is true. Municipality Yeah. They as our fire district

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: Former senator Janet White for the record.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Thank you. Sorry. As our fire districts and water districts, and there's a boatload municipalities in Nevada. So you're covering all It's a tougher

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: question. It's It's pretty broad. It's the answer there. If you're gonna use a water state, how useful building While we have this topic, I did pull up this is in Title 10. In our waste management chapter, you see how they define public building, Use those first three boards we're using, and also airport terminal, bus station, railroad station, school building or school. So, you know, are all those other locations necessarily included in a state county municipal building? I'm not sure about the airport terminal. And to the chair's point, I I think

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: the the risk here has been marked up. We expanded to the point where it seems a little almost ridiculous to accord that we're including so much. So I think, you know, being judicious about what what we're adding and being serious about what we're adding and limited is key to making sure it's somehow.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: I sort of keep circling back to this, but I know there is another bill we're working on, and I can't remember what it is, in Senate government operations that Tucker crafted a really powerful definition and way of wording the municipal piece so that it only captured it didn't capture everything. So I think it may make sense before we come back to this for me, Rick, and Tucker to sit down and try to work on this piece or to have Tucker in work all. Because I do know, like I said, at senate gov ops, we had some similar stuff. I don't I kinda don't remember the bill, but we're working on something very specific around municipalities. But we actually didn't want it to apply as broadly as our definition did. He had a wording for it that really kind of brought it in. So I I think can talk around this more eventually. Yeah.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I think we're trying to get on schedule for next week. I mean, personally, I'm not opposed to just making it narrow to exclusively state buildings. That's my initial feeling on that. But more tests than I've been to make the same. Any members, any other questions on this part? Comments?

[Senator Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Well, I have a comment on it. But I don't in the past, the this the last year before North District Court, the court survey and there are lot of related that goes along with it. My concern is building itself as we're proposing, I object to the all of the the county and the or municipal building being added to this. I think it's too broad. I don't think it's reasonable. I think it was given more thought here to create a sanctuary stage, shall we say, and we don't want to do that. Other than that, I don't have a problem with only specifying civil arrest. So anything with warrant and so on and so forth, they still didn't proceed. But I too don't want anyone. A law enforcement would be charging you or a case would be the election whatever else. I don't think it's at that urgent, but we need, shall we say, about that. The bill in itself, I can't say that I'm fine with

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: it, but I would go along with it, if I

[Senator Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: would ask the entire team to be deleted.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Feeling regarding the defensibility of it, whether it be create something that constructively prohibits federal enforcement entirely, that could be a problem in terms of defensibility. On the other hand, when I look at, if it were to just be state governments, you know, my perspective is that we as a state have our own form of sovereignty and can determine what happens in these state buildings. This is my initial thought on that issue.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: I

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: agree that without a clear definition of what particularly municipal building means, it has the potential to be very, very broad, which is why I'm happy to do some work to try to constrain that and define that less amorphously. But I do feel fairly strongly that the state buildings are literally our buildings. If not in state buildings, where do we have the right to say this happens here or does not happen here? And and when I think about ground buildings and certain municipal buildings, those are places people have to go. But I I will work with legislative council, particularly on that municipal building piece because I am hearing that it is quite amorphous and loose to to tighten that so that it is not so.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I think with the county buildings, I mean, the only county buildings that we really have in the court is basically all of us. And those

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: are already covered with the universities. Parrot arrest stations.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Elevator or so. Because I know we don't really have them done.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: So I wondered just statewide, how many state buildings do we have in the state? DGS. Thought you gave us that answer. We're talking about the broader spectrum of buildings here. That'd be interesting to see that. Yeah. Just like, I'm thinking about a state building at the same bar. State of each owned by the state. It's got, you know, the shacks, the bath houses and whatnot. Does that count? Then bath ones are the areas encompass. It's the property, and I think the number two property owner in the state of Vermont is the state of Vermont after the federal government. I think in a certain way, we should be going after the function of the building, not the walls of the building. So when you talk about churches that's a house of worship, a school, etcetera, it's when we're we're having trouble when we try to just cast a net and say, anything that falls under this because they're multipurpose buildings, and some of them, we obviously don't want to bring in mom.

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: And that's where I'm at.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: That's why I wanted to expand into childcare facilities. And I was totally fine keeping courthouses, schools, the shelters, healthcare facilities, because those are everyday necessities. You wanna make sure people are safe going to a healthcare facility, going to worship, things like that. It's just very broad, the state, county, municipal. I know

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: you're gonna work on it, but it's,

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: you know, it's one thing you don't have to pay your water bill at the local town clerk. You do it online.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: There's just very broad. Yeah.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: How does it sound? I think if you wanna respond.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah. I I hear you, and not everyone has access to be on that, so not everyone can pay it online. But I think, you know, you may have to go to the DMV for something. You may have to get so so let me work on on narrowing it and bring it back and and because I I do hear you. Yeah. You know, is it does it apply to the salt shed? I don't know. Does it need to apply to the salt shed? Probably not. So I will will do some work on this to try and get it at sort of like those because I think some of the things that happen in state county and municipal buildings are necessary aspects of life, and some of them are likely not. So I'll I'll work on that.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Yeah. Think it makes sense to to revisit this and see how or if we can narrow it to a some sort of compromise that we can agree on at the committee. If not, then we'll figure out what to do next regarding that model. Any other thoughts on this particular section? You said you've been talking about it for a while. Any other other pieces that we want to discuss on this bill? Brent, was there anything else that we Yeah,

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: let's go to the the list here. School, Bethany Davis was here. She gave you, that handout I have on the screen as well. You know, she gave you a most inclusive definition of DN, and I wasn't sure if the community wanted to go in that direction or going to be more narrow in the school definition.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Jeremiah thoughts. I mean, I'm initially fine in the list that she describes, that's described on page five. I didn't see the homeschool piece in there. I think it was mentioned earlier. I mean, if it's not in there, then I think that makes sense because if you're being homeschooled, you've already got the right to privacy or the expectation of privacy, they don't call them. So it's not I'd be kind of redundant to have that in the definition. And then I know that we need to hear, we're reaching out to Katie McLennan to address, I think, some of the issues that you brought up. And so we'll hear from them next week as well regarding seamless flexible pathways and the younger programs.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: Is all going to be great.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: And then maybe your thoughts on the school piece? Well, Beth did get back to

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: me on my question on the age, what that was. He's over. Yes. Her response was, the family that pays out of pocket would qualify for for 108 of love for my reading law, would say no, they would not. That a that should be a decision. If the parents thinks it's not school, most of their parents are out of pocket, they'll send their child to our program So that doesn't fall into that point. Okay. I think it's any a private entity or driver's ed in a in a summer. If if you don't get in, it's a full kind of, like, gonna be in according to along

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: the lines of. Am I saying that it wouldn't fall under? It wouldn't it wouldn't fall under that. So it shouldn't fall under that. It would be more so, like, a school sanctioned tutorial program, or like a summer school or something along those lines. That's fine.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: That that will be good. Thank you.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Any any other questions or comments? And there was the issue regarding the contempt and how that only applied for court proceedings. I think that was an area that we needed to clarify further. Just yeah. So I'm looking at, down on page three of the

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: bill, the remedy section. Of course, this is written just for courthouse proceedings. So it says currently, a person violates the subsection by knowingly and willfully executing or assisting with an arrest, prohibited by subsection one, shall be subject to contempt proceedings, and any lie of the simple actions and false imprisonment. So most of that sentence is fine. However, we'll have to I'll have the amount of fledge out that controversy to just reply to the courthouse Okay. Because you won't be held to tempt in a hospital. So that's like restructuring. That's yeah.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: And aside from that, the enforcement mechanism is the AG's office bringing civil action for all the other potential. Or it's either so BNC is a new crime rate of

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: action that's the LCAG.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Any anything on that? Comments, questions? So

[Dolores (Legislative Counsel)]: I'll work on, yeah, Senator Hovsky copied me and Tucker just made Okay, a separate thank you. I don't have my We pulled up. The Subdivision D, I'll have that the DHF guidance from five or two years ago, without the I have my notes here. You basically want that list of places that the DHF previously included as a sensitive location, and then he remains the same for.

[Senator Philip Baruth (Member)]: Alright.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: You. Thank for the update, and then we'll keep working on it. I don't wanna do next week, and we'll hopefully get it out by then. Alright. If you've got ten minutes until for the agenda, take up the Supreme Court confirmation. So we can go up