Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: We are live. We're back in Senate Judiciary. It is February 5. We have Dave Hartman from the Human Rights Committee and floor is yours.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I I may wanna share my slides. Would you mind sending me a quick email with that link? Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today. My name is Big Hartman. I use theythem pronouns. I'm the executive director and general counsel at the State of Vermont Human Rights Commission. The commission is an independent commission on of state government. We are all state employees. There are nine of us now on staff. We are tasked primarily with enforcing Vermont's Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act, which provides anti discrimination protections for folks based on enumerated legally protected categories. Jurisdiction in which we enforce the Fair Employment Practices Act against the state of Vermont as the employer. So for today, I did have some handouts if your committee wants papers. I know not everybody does. I see you've got our budget book. So that's great. Also have a copy of our annual report from fiscal year twenty five, along with a summary document giving you some of the, like, kind of big picture data points. Does that sound like something you would like or

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I rather would.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Okay. Great.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Tanya, you want want me to leave one?

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Popped on my desk for when I'm back. Thank you.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Okay. Perfect. And it's us so that two pager is that slipped in there is, like, a overview at a glance type document. And then I also have copies with me of a mid year fiscal year '26, kind of at a glance report to help summarize some of the kind of updates I have and fill you in on our new two positions that were created and some of the work that they've been doing. So would you like me to go through a little bit in the budget book? I'm happy to do that.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Yeah. That's yes. I'll just give some context. We you know, last year, we developed a document where we got budget requests from everybody. Obviously, appropriations makes the the final call, but we send over our recommendation as a committee of jurisdiction. So, you know, there are so you you don't necessarily need to provide the same granular presentation as you would in appropriations but whatever you think we need to hear, we're happy to hear.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Okay. Beautiful. And I'm just working on getting into Zoom here. So as you may recall, last year we were given two additional positions. I had been kind of making my rounds in committees requesting eight new positions in order to meet the current needs of Vermonters who are requesting that we investigate their complaints of discrimination, move forward with increased outreach and prevention activities, and increase our intake capacity. So we were able to increase our staff for fiscal year twenty six with two additional positions. That was an intake coordinator, a full time employee who was able to start in August. I hired someone who had previously worked at the Human Rights Commission. So he was literally able to hit the ground running on his first day and I handed him a 100 open intake files. We are still hovering around that number despite all the new inquiries we get every day. And we also received funding for a fourth staff attorney investigator. The fourth investigator, similar situation had worked at our office as an intern. She passed the bar and we hired her right away. She was given on her first day, a full caseload of investigations that had been waiting with no investigator assigned some for many, many months.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Just here, maybe you'll be getting to this shortly, but those new positions is that I remember when you came in and it was like, we're at the brink because we need more people. And for these new positions, does it feel like things are slightly more manageable?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Slightly, I think my goal with those two positions was to enable us to maintain a status quo, right? And that kind of tread water without really being able to expand our services or our offerings. From the data of last year, it does look like we're on track to receive more complaints than last year that we accept for investigation. But at the same time, every week I'm continuing to decline investigations because of caseload. And I certainly would say that I decline more than I accept, on a weekly basis.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Got it. Thank you. Can I see Senator Hovsky has a question?

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah. I'm wondering, about the sort of timeframe from something comes in to when someone knows whether it'll be investigated or whether it's declined or and then in addition to what sort of the timeframe of that investigation to resolution is. So I know those are sort of three separate questions.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I think it's a great question. It's something we're with the case management system that we rolled out in the last couple of years, we're now able to track that data even more closely. But I think with an intake coordinator, our data for this year will really give you us a clear number of how long somebody was in an intake status on average. What I can tell you is it's at least a month, and it's typically more like three to five months before from someone's initial inquiry to us to the date that we have a signed complaint ready to be investigated. We do a very comprehensive intake process that usually entails submittal of a questionnaire and then an in like a live intake meeting. And then it needs to get on my desk to consider whether we can accept it. If we do accept it, the intake process moves forward with a complaint draft going back and forth to the parties. So it's a multi step process before a complaint actually gets signed and notarized as required by our rules in order to be investigated. There are rare instances where somebody who has a complaint has an attorney that drafts the complaint for them, that one is probably going to move a little quicker. And we could probably get that one turned around within, I would say three weeks would probably be like the fastest miraculous new complaint process being initiated from an initial inquiry. Historically, our intakes, there could be some expediting of intakes if someone went through Vermont Legal Aid for their intake, Vermont Legal Aid attorneys, even if they weren't gonna represent the complainant would send us a draft complaint, we would be able to really move that forward. Similarly with HUD. HUD has its own intake process and would send cases to us for dual filing and investigation that's already a drafted complaint. We are seeing fewer and fewer cases come to us that way because there have been significant resource cuts to HUD and to Vermont Legal Aid. So folks now have to kind of cold call us instead more frequently. And it's just a accumulation of intakes. But like this week I signed off on new complaints for folks that had initiated their process with us back in August. So really longer than anyone would like. And then on the case age data, I actually do have some good news on that front. And I'll let me just if you would just bear with me for a moment, and I'll share my screen. And I can show you where in the budget book, you can see our some some updates on that. So I'm just waiting for permission to share here. Okay, great.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Senator Hovsky, do you still have a question?

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: I do, but I'll wait until Big is finished answering this question.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Okay, great. So here I am with the budget book and I have a few slides in here. Here's a page that is page eight of 25. That is some big picture statistics. In that center bottom grid square, you can see three sixty six days was the average age of case at the time we completed the investigation in fiscal year twenty five. This is a huge improvement in the three years that the three fiscal years that I've been executive director, we've got in fiscal year twenty four, we averaged four seventy four. But the year before that we averaged six forty nine. And that was, to me, completely unacceptable and something that we needed to improve. So by streamlining some of our investigative report writing process and becoming more familiar and skilled with our case management system, we have been able to get that average age of case to hovering right around a year. For parties to those cases, a year is still way too long. And tack on however long the complaint waited in the intake status. That's not reflected in that three sixty six days. Does that address your question?

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: It does address that part of my question, thank you. And so to be clear, for those three sixty six days plus the, you know, I think you said three to five months in the intake process, someone is potentially being discriminated against not able to access employment housing in the way that they're guaranteed by law.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: That's correct. Okay. And on the other side of that, too, I'll just add that like also, folks who feel like they've been wrongfully accused of discrimination are waiting for like kind of vindication through our process too.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: That is helpful. I know, and I think I see some of the answer to this here. When you came last year to testify, you had really testified that at this point, you were really only able to take sort of the most egregious fair housing issues. It looks like you've been able that that is still the majority of your caseload in this most recent fiscal year, but that you have been able to take on some of the other public accommodation, and employment things.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: That's correct. We did prioritize fair housing enforcement for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's by far the most inquiries we get are about people in their housing or people being denied housing because of something that they believe was discriminatory. Also, HUD, under our cooperating agreement, HUD is obligated to pay us for completion of fair housing investigations. So I saw this as a place that we could grow our budget. They pay us per case. And we were successful at that. We closed many more cases than we had in Fair Housing than the years prior, entitling us to double what we had budgeted and received from HUD in this fiscal year. When they pay us this fiscal year, it's for the cases we closed the year prior. Unfortunately, they are not issuing that payment, and we do not see a likelihood that we will be issued that payment for variety of reasons. I'm happy to get into as we go forward today. But it's not, you know, as we sit here today, we are still taking as many fair housing cases as we can, recognizing the housing crisis that folks are in. We don't want to have folks stay in discriminatory housing situations, or be denied housing because of discrimination and end up in the unhoused population.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: That makes a lot of sense. I can certainly see why you would prioritize that. I'm wondering when you look at, and this is sort of a two part question. When you look at some of the other ones, if you could walk us through a little bit how you do prioritize what you take and don't take. And then with regards to employment specifically, if there's any way of knowing, and there may not be, the impact of someone having discriminatory employment or not being able to be employed due to discrimination and the sort of fiscal impact on the state.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: On the employment side, because our employment jurisdiction is really small, we can only investigate cases involving the state of Vermont as the employer. So we have very few, like maybe a handful of cases each year. This year, we only had five employment discrimination complaints that we accepted for investigation. I would ask that question to the Attorney General's Office Civil Rights Unit. That's Julio Thompson and Emily Adams are the co directors of that, and have a much better pulse on the bigger picture world of employment discrimination. But I do think that you raise a really good question of like, what are the other implications of discrimination? And I don't think that there's capacity within the state as it's currently structured to evaluate that question. We don't have a full time policy director. That type of work is something that we would like to be able to study. We would like to be able to advise legislators and other policymakers about how discrimination is happening, the impacts of it, as well as how to prevent it from happening. But with our so that is a position that I am requesting that we create for fiscal year twenty seven to enable us to do a little bit more big picture thinking around discrimination rather than just like case by case, individual by individual complaints.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Thank you. And I think this is my last question for now. Within your jurisdiction is educational discrimination, yes. Does that fall into public accommodations then?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yes, all schools are included in the definition of public accommodations. And so I would say out of those 19, there is some data in the annual report about we do have some data about our public accommodations cases and how many of them from fiscal year twenty five were school based. So I would refer you in our annual report to page nine and ten. Page nine is an overview of what is public accommodations discrimination, what are our legally protected categories there, and what are places of public accommodation. And then on page 10, I've summarized what are the new cases that we accepted in fiscal year twenty five. And nine out of that 19 total new public housing or public accommodations discrimination complaints, nine of those were against schools.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: And that's both K through 12 and university, yes?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yes.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Okay, thank you. Sorry, I'm not looking at the document being here in the remote sphere, but I appreciate you pointing me to where to find that stuff.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yeah, but I would say the vast majority of them are public school, not college. And I don't believe any of them have been like pre K, but we have had some of those in the past. Okay, I'll keep proceeding along here since we've got the budget book open, we'll just stick with that for the time being. And I don't want to go too deep with you, but I did want to address that historically, we've been able to budget for just under $100,000 each year from that HUD cooperating agreement. I thought your committee would be interested in knowing what's happened with HUD in the past year. HUD has drastically changed its process and policies and staff. When the shutdown occurred prior to that over the summer, there was a lot of folks that left HUD who we would coordinate with. Then when the shutdown occurred in October, they basically laid off everyone that was not employed at headquarters of HUD. And when they brought them back, they have really not been performing any of their normal functions that we would I would do monthly meetings with my HUD contact. We would be monitoring how we're doing on our dual file HUD cases. And there is absolutely none of that happening. They also in October issued new guidance documents for agencies like ours that participate in what's called the FAT program, the Fair Housing Assistance Program, where we have these cooperating agreements where they pay us by case. We do the investigations in those cases. HUD isn't doing them. We're doing them for them to see if the Federal Fair Housing Act has been violated as well as our state law. The new fact guidance for this current year that we're in indicates, first of all, that they are planning to do a review of all the fact agencies and any jurisdiction that has more legally protected categories than what's in federal law is likely to be deemed no longer substantially equivalent and booted out of the program.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Thanks. Just to clarify, regarding the HUD funds, is that entirely the 92,000 that I'm seeing on page 10 or is that just part of it or?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yes, we budgeted last year to receive that much money, and so we were going to conservatively estimate receiving that same amount for fiscal year twenty seven. Based on how things have gone so far in fiscal year twenty six, it is highly unlikely that we will remain eligible for federal funds because of this huge shift in policy at HUD. And also we still have not received payment for fiscal year twenty six. So we are in the Budget Adjustment Act for a small shortfall just needed to be able to meet our operating expenses without anticipating any federal dollars. So we thought we would receive, we budgeted to receive around 92,000 for fiscal year twenty six as well. We earned 185,000 roughly, because we really doubled down on our case closures, yet they paid us zero. There's not really much indication that we're going to receive payment. No other FAC agencies across the country have received their money for the work they did last year. And so, thankfully, in the Budget Adjustment Act for fiscal year twenty six, we really only need very conservatively estimating that we need 25,000 to make it through fiscal year twenty six, paying all of our employees and keeping the lights on. For fiscal year twenty seven, we are also recommending that we do not plan to receive any federal dollars. So that's why you're seeing zero line under federal funds this year, which what had previously been in fiscal year twenty six budgeted to be 92,773. And there and for the governor's recommend for fiscal year twenty seven, they are recommending $27,000 less than our total operating budget for fiscal year twenty six. That is only going to be accomplished with a vacancy turnover savings. You see that in about halfway through the through this what they call the ups and downs on this page 10 document, where it says there's a vacancy turnover savings, and then parentheses 38,000. That's actually 38,000 more of a vacancy savings than we were required to budget last year. So our total actual vacancy turnover savings is around $64,000 that the Governor is expecting us to realize in fiscal year twenty seven. There is no way we could realize that kind of savings without holding a position open. And if no one voluntarily leaves their position, I would have to furlough our staff for several weeks to make up that shortfall. So we are asking the appropriations committees and we would ask your committee as well to recommend crediting our line item with the proposed vacancy turnover savings. You can see that exact amount on another line in here, which is on page 17 under personal services, there's this vacancy turnover savings that you can see the last this current fiscal year we were sorry, didn't mean to make that disappear. Oh, spreadsheets. Sorry about that. Where we were required to budget in a $25,000 vacancy turnover savings for fiscal year twenty six. And now for fiscal year twenty seven, the governor is recommending a $64,540 vacancy turnover savings. We will not be able to achieve that. And we have not received an explanation of how we are supposed to achieve that unless someone leaves and all of their work is on hold for several months. So with a team of only nine people, that's more than half of one person's salary. In addition to that concern that we have about this vacancy turnover savings were being made to budget, we also don't feel that the governor's recommended budget allows us to continue to respond to the growing need for civil rights enforcement, policy, and litigation. And so my budget memos to the appropriations committees are requesting three additional positions. I don't think I need to share this much more unless there were questions about we don't want to go into deep on this. It starts to hurt my brain and my eyes and everything. So we are requesting three additional positions. One is a policy director. So we had Amanda Garces was our director of policy education outreach for the last five years. She left last March. And since that, I kept that position vacant. That's how we achieved the vacancy turnover savings of last year by me doing two jobs for about five months. When we were able to fill that position in the beginning of fiscal year twenty six in July, we reworked that position so it's strictly a community engagement position. We are really trying to respond to the needs of Vermonters to have more education outreach prevention work and community engagement around civil rights issues. That full time position being devoted community engagement resulted in us being able to put on a very successful civil rights summit in November, which was the original topic for my time with you today. Out of that summit, we have a slate of policy recommendations that the civil rights community in Vermont advocates, activists, and our most marginalized community members are recommending action that legislators and lawmakers as well as, you know, state leaders consider advancing this year in order to address what we all feel is a civil rights crisis that is upon us. So I'm happy to get into that, but I will say that being able to have one position just doing education outreach work is invaluable. Are really growing our reach. However, as I told this committee and other committees in the past, when we grow our reach, more people know that we exist, and more people want to file complaints with us. It just it's, you know, and we don't feel like it's responsible to pull back on community engagement because it might increase our workload in other areas. We're trying to do everything we can to advance both civil and human rights in Vermont. So to that end, we do feel that there's also a need for a full time another full time staff attorney investigator, which would bring our investigator role up to five. We're currently at four. And we are asking again for a paralegal position. This is someone that would enable us to deal with a lot of the administrative clerical duties associated with our 15 cases that are currently in litigation. We usually have between fifteen and twenty at any given time now, and we have one attorney who is doing also work on those cases. With we did take on a small contract for an attorney to assist with some of those cases using our special litigation fund.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Senator Bobos, you have a question and then we can go on to the policy recommendations. Yeah.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Absolutely. So last year, you came and asked for eight people. We gave you two. Now you're asking for three. That only adds up to five, not eight. So I would expect you to be here asking for at least six people. So what has shifted that you feel like you need less now, even though the workload is, I mean, we're in a civil rights crisis, as you've pointed out. So I'm just, I'm a little confused.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I really appreciate that question. It was a tough decision to make, but I am seeing the writing on the wall in this building. And my conservative request for three positions was in the hopes that we would actually be able to achieve getting those three positions as the bare minimum of what we need and kind of like trying to be realistic about what's actually achievable for this year given all of the other changes with federal dollars.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah, I appreciate that. And that was going be a follow-up is given the loss of federal dollars, I would actually expect you to be here asking for more than eight, total. And I just I worry because our civil rights are really only as good as the paper they're written on if we have no ability to uphold them and defend them. And so I appreciate you coming in and wanting to be conservative. And given what we're looking at in the federal landscape and frankly, the state landscape, I'm pretty concerned that we're not really full heartedly supporting everything you need to defend people's civil rights when they're under sort of daily attack. That's a statement, not really a question.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I'm nodding. We really, we are feeling that we are in unprecedented times. We are so relieved that we did get those two positions to enable us to tread the water that we're treading right now. And yet there are still so many community members feeling that our agency is not doing enough. You know, one of the ways that I tried to address that was by, you know, shifting what had formerly been Amanda Garces's position into a full time community engagement position, recognizing how much the community is calling for our, you know, the capital S state to be a leader on civil rights advancement. And so we are trying to do that and it is feeling like no matter what we get, we'll still be treading water.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah. I I hope you'll be treading water. I mean, there's a deluge coming in. It's gonna be difficult to tread water in the same way that previously might have been possible without that. So I appreciate, and I want to be clear, this is not a criticism of what you're asking for. It's a larger statement on sort of the space that we're in. And my concern, as I personally know of people who have egregious civil rights complaints that simply there is no capacity to take on.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I'm wondering if we could shift gears to the policy recommendations since we only have about twenty five minutes left and the policy is that's our jurisdiction where we can actually make some more differences.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I have more handouts. If you want them, it's totally up to you. This is the full report that came out of the three day civil rights summit that we hosted in Randolph in November. And I do have some of these recommendations in a slide deck, so if you just bear with me for another moment. Let me get those up. Okay so I kind of want to premise this part of my presentation today to kind of underscore of the remarks by Senator Vyhovsky. I mean, it really is it's one thing to have anti discrimination protections on the book, but ensuring that all people who live and work in Vermont have equitable access to all aspects of our civil society really takes a lot more than just having anti discrimination laws. While our office is attempting to respond to the increased calls by community advocates in marginalized communities for state level action and leadership on progressive civil rights policies, and we also cannot rely on the federal government to be a partner with us in enforcing civil rights, we felt the need to respond to this situation by holding a conference that we it's something that we have never done before. And what we found was the response to us putting on an event like this was even greater than we expected. We've had over 300 people participate in our Civil Rights Summit. We had two main goals of this summit. One was just to bring folks together. I think that there's a lot of hopelessness happening. There's a lot of doom and gloom. There's a lot of fear and worry amongst community members, advocates, and especially black and brown people and trans people in Vermont right now. So not only do we want to bring people together under the umbrella of the state of Vermont and provide leadership on that, we also wanted to give folks a forum to really discuss practical strategies. What do we need right now to strengthen our state level civil rights protections? That ended, and so it was really a community centered event. It was not about the Human Rights Commission touting all of our work. It was about lifting up the voices of the folks on the front lines right now of defending our civil rights. So we ended up with 15 panels that covered a range of topics. And I'll let you kind of guide me on which ones you'd like me to focus on. I certainly am trying to track as best I can what your committee has been looking at lately and what is happening on the house side that might wind up being considered by you this year. But the range of topics include housing, immigrant justice, trans rights, disability access, education, equity, equal protection and racial justice. So on the housing access front, we do have these five recommendations. Again, these are these are recommendations from the community. The one that I feel could have the most implication for your committee would be a proposal to add housing status as a legally protected category in our three areas of anti discrimination laws. This has been entertained in bills over the last several years, including like a homeless bill of rights that has been kicked around on the house side for many years. It is now in a bill that is being taken up on the house side to add legally protected rights for folks to be free of discrimination based on their housing status in housing, public accommodations and employment. We definitely support that and it seems like the house side is where some of these other issues might be advanced. There's a number of different housing bills to address landlord tenant needs at this time, while also I think it seems like the Senate side is focusing more on getting some bills to streamline some housing production. So we will see in the second half of the session likely these things flip to the other sides, hopefully. But I'm not gonna focus too much on housing because I really wanna talk with you all about immigrant justice. And there are four recommendations that came out of an incredible panel about the future of immigration and the future for immigrant justice in Vermont. And if you are using the report, you'll be able to scan the QR code or click on the link for this panel and all of the panels to actually watch the eighty minute discussion that took place and was filmed by Orca Media. One of the big concerns we have is about what's happening with folks who are detained in Vermont under this federal contract with DOC. And one of the big concerns we have is that first of all, I just want to name that these folks are people of color. This is a part of a larger federal racist policy to remove black and brown people from our community. And when they are detained by ICE, they are detained for civil, for alleged civil violations. They're not charged with crimes. And yet we are housing them with folks who are charged with crimes in our DOC facilities. And when they are there, the advocates are telling us that especially in recent months, they are being denied language access. People are housed in DOC custody, and they don't even know that they're in the state of Vermont. They don't, they are not being provided language access to enable them to communicate effectively with their attorneys, if they can find attorneys, or to, access the medical services that are available through DOC. This is a real concern for us. So one of one bill that the immigrant justice advocates and the HRC support would create at least state funded access to legal counsel similar to a public defender type system for folks who are facing the potential removal to be able to have legal counsel provided for them through a state funded resource. And right now we are relying on primarily volunteer immigration attorneys and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project to provide legal counsel and there is simply not the capacity to meet the need of the folks that are continually cycling in and out of the Vermont custody system.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Quick question, have you this might be too into the weeds regarding access to legal counsel, but have you looked at the distinction between providing legal counsel for all as opposed to providing legal counsel for indigent detainees? Because I'm thinking about the requirement under the fourteenth amendment and regardless of whether it's criminal or civil and people who are deprived of their liberty being indigent regardless of whether it's criminal or civil should have a right to an attorney. Do you have any additional information on that or is that too into the weeds?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: That's a little more into the weeds than I'm familiar with the bill that's been drafted. But my recommendation would be if you wanted the best answer to that question would be to speak with the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project who are really on the front lines of ensuring some kind of access for these folks both to the justice system and their like regular medical care and other services that DOC provides. They have been, House Corrections Committee has been taking some testimony about the current state of what's happening with folks who are detained here in Vermont. And I will say that it's very troubling to hear that it appears that in many instances, folks who are detained with this federal ICE contract are having less access to justice, less access to attorneys, less access to medical care than folks who are imprisoned because of criminal conduct. Kind of a blended discussion of these first two points under immigration justice together. There could be some DOC changes that would help us feel more confident that there are equitable services provided to these folks. There's a real language access problem though. There's no doubt about it within the facilities. There's also recommendations from the immigrant justice community to take more action to safeguard our community spaces. I know that you've been taking a lot of testimony on S two zero nine about this, and we strongly support increasing the laundry list of places that people can be that people should be able to access without fear of being unlawfully detained by federal agents. We also support S two zero eight, which is seeking to ensure that all law enforcement officers identify themselves. And we strongly support the mandate that they not be wearing face covers as a matter of course. I mean, any of us interacting with law enforcement here in Vermont would be very troubled to have that person anonymous to us. And I think it's really stoking significant fear within the immigrant community and not just the immigrant community, but also folks who are US citizens, but happen to be brown or black or Spanish speaking. And so I just really want to reiterate our support for those two bills that I believe are here in this committee. Thank you for all the time you've already taken for considering those issues. And the fourth recommendation about immigrant justice is encouraging the state to move faster forward with creating an office of new Americans. There's a study committee that was authorized last year. And the reality of onboarding a new office is that if we wait until the end of fiscal year twenty seven to do that, it's a long way off. And it will they will need fiscal year twenty seven just to kind of start building a network and resources and identify needs. So we would encourage at least some funding to do some initial creation of that Office of New Americans in fiscal year twenty seven rather than waiting. So that is my spiel on immigrant justice. And I again, really want to spotlight the incredible work that advocates and representatives of the immigrant community right now are offering. And I would encourage you to take more testimony from the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, as well as the ACLU Vermont who are really holding a lot of leadership on these issues. I will mention in the area of queer justice that we did have one recommendation that arose from the summit, and that is the creation of a gender affirming care fund. This has recently been introduced. This is to address the reality that the federal government now is proposing changes to Medicare and Medicaid that would severely limit or all out defund any gender affirming care for trans people. And I want you to know that gender affirming care is truly life saving care when, especially for youth, if youth do not have access to that care, their rates of suicide risk skyrocket. And it's, this is a an attempt to enable there to be some way of paying for a very low number of expenses related to gender affirming care that would allow providers to have ways to provide that care and have some funding stream to support that work while not losing all of their federal funds because of these new proposed rules.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Is that in ways and means?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: I am not sure where that one is.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I was scared.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: But yeah, that would be the hope. We've talked already about the need for an increase in resources to our office and our counterparts who are doing the enforcement work on the employment side at the Attorney General Civil Rights Unit. That office, I will say, has a very, very small team processing a large number of cases. They do not use the same process. They don't have the same statutory and rule based process that the Human Rights Commission has, which enables them to move cases in a little bit different way. And they are able to have a higher number of discrimination complaints that they can process each year. But we have both both of our offices have experienced a real uptake in new complaint requests in the last couple of years. And we've not seen coinciding increase in resources to meet that need. We also really wanna be doing prevention work in a way that we are very hamstrung in doing it simply out of resources. When I was asked about school based harassment, I want you to know that I have started doing more and more school harassment prevention trainings. It's extremely well received. This is for rank and file teachers and staff members at school districts. And we are doing this because we don't see the agency of education providing leadership on these issues and giving schools the tools that they need to really prevent harassment. So harassment is on the rise in schools. And we are trying to address that by providing more prevention training. But I just simply can't be in all places all the time. And if we had another policy director, we would expect that that person would be involved in some of that prevention work as well, take some of the load off of me to enable me to get in the community more to do prevention training. I also do fair housing training. I've also on a regular basis, that's free training that our office offers every other month. And then I've been trying to continue to expand our offerings around workplace prevention, harassment prevention training, and disability discrimination prevention training. There is no shortage of requests for those types of trainings. And we just don't always have the time to get out in front of the community offering that as much as we would like. Our thought being the more people know what their rights and responsibilities are under our anti discrimination protections, the less likely they are to wind up having a complaint filed against them. On the disability rights front, we are, you know, we deal with disability rights every day, it's at least half of all the complaints that we process involve disability discrimination. And through that work, we are hearing increasing calls from the disability community about unmet needs. And so there was a panel that I facilitated about access to elections, town meetings and public meetings that I highly recommend you watch, where you can hear from members of the Vermont disability community who are actively denied the ability to vote and participate in their town elections because of a failure to have properly understand the law and afford reasonable accommodations for folks. So if folks can't attend their town meeting because of a disability, they are generally shut out of the process and do not get to vote. And similarly with other types of local voting that happens, even if it's Australian ballot, it's not typically a mail in ballot, something you've got to physically go to the polling place to do to do your voting. But if you have a disability that hinders your ability to travel or leave your house or get out of bed, you are often shut out of your local election process. So we do have recommendations about how we can improve that moving forward. And we do hope that our gov ops committees are gonna be taking that up along with other voting rights expansions that don't squarely yet as drafted really address the disability access piece. So I'll continue moving on because I want to make sure that we have time to cover a few more items. Under the broad category of justice for all, this is where we see some recommendations that are also relevant to your work. And we strongly endorse the speedy passage of Prop four. Yeah. That prop for proposal?

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Proposition. Proposition.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: We'll just call it prop. But it is hard to search for it on our legislative website when you search PR for it doesn't come up. It's kind of squirrely because it's in that different type of category of kind of standard bills. But you all know we're in the second biennium for this to get passed out. We strongly support this. We really think that now more than ever, we really need to be following the lead of the majority of other states in the country that have state level constitutional protections for people based on our many of our legally protected categories. And there's all there was also a a great panel about the fair and impartial policing policy that I would also encourage you to watch to hear, you know, both from folks at VCJC, Vermont State Police, and the, you know, communities of color who have been advocating for stronger training and support for the Fair and Impartial Policing Policy to be carried out on a day to day basis across the state. We have a number of recommendations relating to education equity. We had a wonderful panel about that as well. And this is an issue that I have spent a lot of time working on because we're really concerned about the state of harassment and discrimination in schools right now. As you may know, the Office of Civil Rights within the federal agent Department of Education has basically been dismantled. Most of their offices across the country were closed in the past year. And now that office seems to be a tool to go after schools who are implementing DEI and prevention programs. That really underscores our need to continue to prioritize these types of complaints in our office. But we also see a need for more leadership from the Agency of Education in carrying forward a lot of the work that's been done over the last many years to do better harassment prevention, to maintain better data about harassment incidents at school, which is currently not available online at all. Even though the agency requires that people that report on that data, that data is not readily available. And we will continue to support the removal of the severe pervasive standard for harassment in schools. Lots more I can say about that. Did, I have been given some time at the education, at least on the health side education committee so far. And I know that that's where those conversations tend to initiate. But it is tough as we're talking so much about restructuring school funding mechanisms. We tend to lose focus on keeping our kids safe in schools. And school based discrimination is very, most often involving students of color. Although we are seeing more cases involving discrimination based on harassment based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, as well as national origin.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Thank you. We're almost at time, but Senator Mattos has a question and Senator Bahoski. No, I just wanted to correct myself. It is proposal four and it is hard to find. Right. I'll agree with you. I just had to Google, but it is proposal for.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yeah, absolutely. This is a little bit of a question around this sort of education equity aspect. I know I heard from one district in my district that they would be looking at $6,000,000 in cuts to special education funding under the current sort of plan being floated. Do you have any sense of whether that is a unique cut or if that would be seen more largely across the system, those cuts to special education funding? Because that to me is a pretty clear education equity issue.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: It's a very clear education equity issue. I don't have any knowledge about that. I'm sorry. Okay, that's okay. Yeah, actually our statute when it comes to discrimination in schools expressly states that we do not have jurisdiction for special education issues. So often we have a ton of folks contacting our office saying they're not following through with my IEP, you know, we don't think they're giving them enough accommodations or services. And we refer those folks to the Agency of Education because it is not within our jurisdiction. But we can handle disability discrimination if it's something that's outside of like an IEP. Okay,

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: so IEPs and that type of discrimination for K-twelve is AOE, but something else is your purview?

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yeah, so for an example, we had a student who was deaf in one of our public schools, who had an elaborate IEP, right? The parents had complaints about how that IEP was being carried out, but they also had complaints about the student experiencing harassment based on being deaf, as well as other accommodations that aren't related to access to education not being met, such as a need for the alarm system to signal for her, a deaf student, if the alarm system is only auditory, she's not going to be informed of there being a fire alarm, right? So that type of accommodation is separate from an IEP, but it's since it's disability related, it was within our jurisdiction.

[Senator Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: And how does that intersect with university as I don't, I actually don't know, but I don't imagine IEPs are as prevalent in the university system.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Yeah, we do have more and more, sorry. We do have, we are hearing from folks in graduate programs and at the college level who are able to file complaints without us if they feel that their discriminal disability related accommodations have not been met. Thank you.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Thank you. Sorry, not trying to make you feel rushed, we just have to go into another meeting with the House judiciary. But thank you. It was a helpful presentation.

[Big Hartman, Executive Director & General Counsel, Vermont Human Rights Commission]: Thank you so much.

[Senator Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Be in touch. Great. We can go up.