Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Are

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: We're live.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: We are live. Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 01/14/2026. Good morning, and welcome to a joint hearing between senate and house transportation. We appreciate everybody joining us this morning. The subject for today is one of those difficult ones. There's been a number of high profile, high publicity items, some really tragic events on the highway, particularly on the interstate, as well as some pedestrian activity. We have a lot of men and women out that are charged with safety on our highways across the state. And this morning, what we really like to do is hear what are the trends, what is happening out there, and what are all the things that we do as a state to keep the people of Vermont safe and to continue to work on new programs that we'll hear more of later in the day. Highway safety is critical to everyone, and that's the purpose of this morning's Joint Transportation Committee's meetings. Senator Westman, if you have something you'd like to add.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: I'm Richard Westman. I'm the senator of from Lamoille and the chair of Senate Transportation. Our committee went around the room talking about what the priority of the members of the committee were, and safety was on the list of all five of us within the committee mentioned safety as an area of concern. We've paid in some testimony in the area we started yesterday with a court administrator and looking at enforcement actions that have been taken. Some of it was booked fine to us. How many cars are registered and were the numbers from pre COVID to now are about the same. The number of actions that we're taking for speeding violations is dramatically down. We're talking before COVID and that this is just from memory, over 40,000 tickets handed out in the last couple of years, 20,000 or less. So the enforcement actions that are taken are dramatically less. We're in the process of digging through those numbers to figure that all out. We thought it important to dig deeper into the issues. Do we have different policies now than what we had before COVID? Why would we attribute those actions? What it is, we will take further testimony in our committee from the court administrator and and dig deeper into that. So we're happy to have enforcement here today to hear from them and hear the issues around it. I might add is one of the second pieces of one of the things that went around our table in Senate transportation. And I would say this to house transportation is, we had at least a couple of members that wanted to make sure that we met with other committees in the building to spread our influence. So we're happy that we can do that as we're getting started this session. And at that, I think we are ready to go. Is this in order, Megan?

[Representative Mollie Burke]: Not necessarily.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: So I'm looking for who would like to be first from the group. Or do you wanna come up in more than one of you at a time?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: That's okay. Morning. Good morning. Apologize for a second. Am not Mr. Technology. Did it. We're getting there. Eric, thank you very much. Well, good morning, again. My name is Ben Shulpe. I am the lieutenant for the Northeast Sector on Department of Motor Vehicles, Enforcement and Safety Division. I was asked to just give you a brief overview of what 2025 looked like for commercial vehicle enforcement section. Those of you who are not familiar, I'll give you just a real quick rundown. So the CVE section within the enforcement and safety division has about 22 officers that are sworn to civilian inspectors. The civilian inspectors are largely charged with completing, safety audits and compliance reviews on companies.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Carriers. They

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: do, however, have to complete a minimum amount of inspections every year so that they so that they stay certified. So their inspection numbers do do count. So CV is broken into three different sectors. There's Northwest, Northeast, and the South units. And there's a traffic enforcement team that is focused on crash reduction. And most of their patrol is centered in high crash corridors that have been identified through programs that I'll talk about here in a couple of minutes. Just to give you an idea of caseload So the department punched about 15,600 or so cases last year. So stay pretty busy. Just gives you a little look at how what the breakdown is for our, department in the areas of responsibility.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Okay. So

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: this is a pretty is a pretty standard scene that's Sheffield Heights on I 91 North Shine. And we get a few every year that look just like that. So there's a breakdown of

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: This doesn't look like a good day.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Yeah. That's not a good day. Actually, that's not a good day. There's a little bit of a breakdown of our work throughout the year. So just under 10,000 inspections completed by those those 24 folks. Another 1,300 car stops just on passenger vehicles. I don't wanna read through all of them. The the agency assists, the safety audits, and the compliance reviews that those two civilian inspectors complete. You can see it it stays it stays pretty pretty hot for us. They had 21 DRE activations, which, inspector Knight will come up and and talk about here in just a little bit, but those are drug recognition experts. That's a worse day. So you can see that last year there's total about four forty two commercial motor vehicle crashes in the state with one hundred and fifty seven of those being reportable. Reportable meaning that there was an injury where somebody left in an ambulance. There's disabling damage, meaning that it had to get towed away, either a commercial motor vehicle or any other vehicle that was involved or that it was a a fatality. So one hundred and fifty seven basically means that it had to get reported out to federal motor carrier. What was that? An 18 wheeler? Yes. That's an 18 wheeler, propane truck in Irisburg.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Yep. Yep.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Go ahead, Andy.

[Senator Andrew “Andy” Perchlik]: Yeah. Let's finish up. The is when you say commercial vehicles, does that include all commercial vehicles or only the large commercial vehicles?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: That's all commercial motor vehicles. Somebody in

[Senator Andrew “Andy” Perchlik]: a plumbing van? Exactly. So as long

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: as it's over 10,000 pounds, so 10,001 pounds or more. And that would be in interstate commerce operating between states. And then, if it's in trust state, meaning their trip is encompassed or the whatever they're delivering originates and ends within the state, it's going to be $2,626,000 or one pound or more.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Yeah. A little confusing. Yes, ma'am.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Jamie Burke.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: Can we ask questions now, or would you like to finish your presentation?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: You're the boss.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: I've just been concerned about, especially overblade trucks coming down Route 9 out of the Brattlebrook, particularly from Marlborough, which they're in Europe, and they often come speeding down that mountain. So I just wondered what kind of speed enforcement is. Patrol there?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: What's So that that's not my area of responsibility. So I'm not intimately familiar with their daily activities down there, but I do know that there are inspectors that live on either side of Route 9 and they spend a fair amount of time traversing that road. I know that there are there's at least one site that is a regular detail site where they set up an operation regularly. So they do spend a fair amount of time right there. I did not run the the stats for for Route 9 by itself, but I apologize. Anything else? So 134 post crash inspections. So what we mean by that is if we go to a if you go to a crash, there's many things that have to be done. But one of them is going to be a uniform crash report, which is typical. It happens for passenger cars as well. It's the crash report you get when you're involved in a crash and that you send to your insurance company, what have you. But there's a second part of that, which is a post crash inspection, which is basically it's a roadside inspection that we complete every day at roadside, but it's much more detailed and it involves trying to look for any type of either driver error, equipment failure that may have contributed to the cause of that crash. And once again, happens when it's a commercial motor vehicle crash. There's another category called a level seven, and we would do that. It's called a jurisdictional inspection, which we might complete on, things like, municipal truck or a state truck or vehicles like that that are typically exempt from the federal regulations. A couple of projects that we have going and and near completion. So that picture is in Coventry at I 91 Northbound, and you'll see a a post there with power attached to it just to the left of the biomarker sign. That's called a smart roadside system that we've purchased from a company called Fleetwoody. So there's a an exact, replica of that just on the opposite side of the road, still northbound, but so it covers both lanes. So that system does does many things, but basically what it does is it takes pictures of, US DOT numbers whenever a vehicle goes by so that we can identify a company before they get to our detail and we know who's coming in, what their safety score looks like, and whether or not they may require an inspection. Kinda helps us speed up the process not only for us but it's important for carriers to have that process speed sped up because it's business and and time is very important to them. So, some of the other things it does, it it does detects tire anomaly. So, it has strips in the road that are called Kistler strips and they act as winds or weigh in motion system. So, it'll weigh the vehicle as it goes over it. But it also detects tire anomalies. So, it'll let us know if a vehicle that's coming in has flat tires. We'll know that. Bless you. Thank We'll know that. We'll have all that information before the vehicle pulls into the detail. So the strips that are in the road are on the main line, meaning they're not on a ramp either off or onto the road. They're just on the main line, which means that the Department of Transportation can grab ahold of that information and use that way data twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year, and send that to federal highway, which, you know, we are held accountable for how many vehicles we weigh every year towards our our maintenance money that we get from the federal government. And that is helping us in that endeavor. So this one was just installed in December and energized about two weeks ago. There's another one that just went in in Hartland, northbound, where the FEMA site was. And then last or I'm sorry. Two years ago, one was installed in Colchester, and we've been having some some pretty good luck good luck with that. Senator Harrison.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Thank you. Thank you very much. This is very interesting. So are you, will will there be this in every, entrance into the state, on an a, interstate highway? Is that the goal?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: I think I think the goal is unknown at the moment. We're still pretty early in the program. It's pretty young. We're still collecting data and then seeing how how everything works for us. I think the goal ultimately would definitely be to have more installed. The problem isn't purchasing them because it's it's federal grants typically through mix up for the for the purchase of it. It's the maintenance of it. Typically, that's the problem. And, that would require state funds. So we don't wanna get ourselves immersed into a situation where we have all this good, technology, but we can't keep it up and running.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: And does it I have a bunch of questions, I'm just gonna stick to one. Does it take that information just from vehicles of a certain weight and not take the information from passenger vehicles?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Yeah. It has that it has that capability. There's a there's a weight capability. So you can set it so that it'll only trigger for certain things. But largely what is triggered by that would be the weight side of the program. The picture side of the program is trying to read. It's trying to read the side of the vehicle. So if your vehicle doesn't have anything on it, it's it won't it won't trigger the camera.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Interesting. Okay.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Does that make does that make sense?

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: It does. I'll have more questions.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Yeah.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: It's part of this and I

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: think other people

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: To answer your question, there there is spillover, but it's it's coincidental. It it's, you know, it's not, you know, it's trying to take a picture of a vehicle that's going up the road at 65 miles an hour. So Right. Every you'll get the occasional picture of a pickup truck, something like that. But Yeah. There's nothing wrong with

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: So how we manage that data, obviously,

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: is critically important. So Okay.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Some of my questions. Thank you.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Represent Wells? Are those

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: set up right before those weighing stations? Correct. They are. So they they hit that before the truck gets the within pulls and gets weighed.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Yes. So that one's right at Correct. Yeah. They don't have to be. You can put them, I mean, they can be used quite frankly, it's probably the feature of commercial vehicle enforcement is to have these in different locations throughout the state. That is how data driven policing works. And the goal is to have them elsewhere. But like I said, now, we're kind of managing how we go forward. Just a couple other projects continuing. Just a picture of a speed cart. We purchased three speed carts and virtual message boards last year. And we're placing these out. The traffic team is hauling them out, putting them in high trash corridor areas that have been identified just in an effort to curb driver behavior. And that's really just what they're for, to just try to influence behavior. And the video or I'm sorry, virtual message boards just allow us to put out any type of whether it's traffic warning or anything like that that we can. Probably the famous one would be the one for one zero eight that's on Route 15 in Jeffersonville.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Yeah. Another

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: project, we received fantastic data from Vermont Transportation. But we've also teamed up with the University of Massachusetts, who takes all of our data and compiles it and creates really good crash maps and help us kind of identify where we need to focus a majority of our time so that we're kind of getting the most bang for our buck. And that's been, that's been good so far. We've only had one interaction with them, but the, the product that they provided was was really good and, put the use with, with some success. Just the enforcement action. So last year, our department issued just about 4,400 tickets and warnings across the board. You can see the breakdown there. Tickets and warnings at 1,690 of those were actually to commercial vehicle driver or company, and the rest would have been to passenger vehicles.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: There are 44 criminal arrests. So we've been asking, and we asked the court administrator and they've been digging out data for the last ten years.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: So it

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: would be helpful for us for comparison reasons to go back to 15 or 16 and produce those numbers so we can have a look of what's happened over time.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Okay. And

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: if you can get those back.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Yeah, I think we can go back to our department I believe can go back to 15 because we were on the same CAD program for that period.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: We have all of those figures now, the budget covers and registrations. So would be for commercial vehicles, it

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: would be helpful to have all of them.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Okay. Excellent. We'll take that back. So this screen is just for size and weight enforcement. It gives you an idea of what we're doing for weight enforcement, which once again directly correlates to federal highway funds. So the four fifty five portable ways throughout the year with, an additional almost 9,000 platform ways. Those platform ways are taken at the Fairhaven and Putney scale houses, which are, physical scale houses that actually have scales in the ground. That number does include WIM data or virtual scales from Colchester, Colchester Northbound. So the Ways in Motion, that is specific to Colchester Northbound and you can see the amount of data, the difference that we can pump out to Federal Highway and give them a real clear picture as to really what's traversing our roadways and how much those vehicle weighs. But that is pretty endless for the Department of Transportation, what they can do to what they can use it for. So there were two fifteen citations issued for size and weight violation, forced offload of 10 vehicles. What's that mean? Force offload. So whenever a vehicle is over 15,000 pounds over their permitted weight, there's a force offload that that takes place. It doesn't necessarily always happen. Some of it I don't wanna call it convenience, but it it could generate some hate if you force off load a vehicle two miles away from where they're unloading. And that happens with some frequency. So but it's incumbent upon the company to offload the vehicle down to its legal weight, and then they can figure out what to do with the product and how to get it moved from there afterwards. So our permitting department issued about 8,500 single trip permits, nondivisible. And they issued about 2,000 blanket permits. Those are annual size permits over dimensions for things like building, you know, trusses, things like that, roof trusses that traverse our state every day heading heading south to Southern New England typically. And then we issued about 8,400 overweight, which are just general overweight permits. 55 60 69, ninety, ninety nine thousand pound permits. What we typically see for for permits issued for overweight. And that's really, just the just the high side view of, what went on last year at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Take any questions you have.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Thank you very much for coming in and putting together. Lieutenant, you mentioned a couple of different times on the high crash corridors and mapping and whatnot. Is that something we'll be able to get more of as we I'd like to see what those crash corridors are and whatnot. Is there maps that you talked about, the the this partnership with University of Massachusetts, etcetera? Yep. We'll be able to get some additional information on that as we

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: Yeah.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: I absolutely. I I can get you that stuff. And just in the interest of time, I know you have a lot to fit in here in this in this big block. I didn't put it in here, but, yeah, absolutely.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: I would just say for all of this and the way and everything, more information that you can do on a ten year basis so we can see what what the trends are is important.

[Senator Becca White (Vice Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Well, thank you, Mr. Chair. You stole the word out of my mouth, which is I wanted to ask if you had identified any trends during your career or in your position of leadership that you wanted to share with us about what you're seeing. Then And I wanted to ask if you actually are staffed at the level you need to perform the type of enforcement that Vermonters are expecting.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: As far as trends go, I don't know that we've had any real dips in behavior. I think we're sitting pretty consistently as far as traffic infractions go, violations, whether for companies or or driver's equipment, things of that nature. I think they're they're pretty pretty status quo. I haven't run any of the numbers to be honest to to to really give you the the correct information on that. But it's certainly something I can I can get to you? As far as staffing goes, we're full staffing. Full staffing never means that we're appropriately staffed. There's plenty of work to go around. And we are largely a regulatory department. So we're self generating. So I guess we make our own problems.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: But

[Senator Becca White (Vice Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: just to clarify, there isn't a gap between folks doing or not having enforcement happen to them that you are missing in your view. Like, there's not like a gap of commercial truck drivers that because, you know, you would stop them, but you just don't have the manpower to do it or the woman power to do it.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: I think that absolutely happens overall. I mean, typically when we're patrolling and to give you an example, I showed you the map. There's five guys that work for me in the Northeast and they cover whatever that is, two and a half, three, actually it's more than that, counties. So a lot of times when we're called and we're given a request from dispatch whether it's to respond to a crash or it's a vehicle that's been called in, that they would like us to to look into or go find. A lot of times travel time can be an hour to two hours. So I suppose it it is what it is, but spread pretty thin, you know, and I would say every sector feels that same.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Thank you. Representative

[Representative Powell]: Powell? Yes. Hi. Thanks for being here. I'm interested in the Smart Road automation automated system. I mean, how long have we had them? Do you feel like it's providing assistance in your work as you're screening trucks and are you aware of other New England states doing it? Are we in front of that curve, behind the curve? Where are we as far as adopting that technology?

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: We're catching up, would say. Other New England states are ahead of us in the adoption of things like this. There are other programs out there not necessarily this one. But I would say on a whole we're catching up with a lot of the other states as far as the way we conduct patrol and enforcement. It's certainly the direction that we need to continue moving in. As far as its effectiveness, we're still collecting the data on that. But I mean, it it it's pretty impressive whenever a a truck can come up the road and whenever it pulls in, you know that the company is under a federal out of service order and they have three flat tires and we just, you know, go to the inspection.

[Representative Powell]: You would say it may not be this system. There may be changes, but this sort of technology would continue going into the future. That that is

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: the whole to get to give you an example, Maine has one installed in in York on 90 5 Northbound and their inspection rate or their out of service rate for their inspections For that location went to 100%, which means the only vehicles they bothered inspectioning at that facility, they could have service. That's kind of unheard of. You know, there's I don't think there's a better example out there for how that benefits not only enforcement but industry. The trucks that need attention are getting the attention and the companies that need attention are getting the attention. And I think that's the hope.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Thank you very much. I think we're at a spot where we appreciate you coming in and your and your testimony and a couple of notes on follow-up, and we'd like to move to the next where they decided in the route

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: to go. Thank you for having me.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: Thank you.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Morning. Welcome.

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: Morning. My name is Clay Knight, an inspector with Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles. And I'm not sure if we have the slide table to be put up there.

[Senator Becca White (Vice Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Is your guy doing it?

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: I made that mistake.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: So

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: I just mainly want to focus on Vermont's DEC program, our Drug Evaluation and Classification program, and our DREs, or drug recognition experts, and where Vermont DMV takes part in that particular program. Does have thank you very much. Vermont has approximately 44 DREs. We're about to have another school, hopefully this spring, to boost some of those numbers. The Department of Motor Vehicles has three inspectors that service DREs. There is one DRE instructor of four in the state, which is myself. And as an organization, the Department of Motor Vehicles conducted 21 of the five zero six evaluations that occurred this last year. Just want to highlight that five zero six number. That is the highest number of evaluations that we've done as a program since 2005. We have seen the call volume increase over the years. Vermont does lead the nation for the past couple of years with the most evaluations per DRE. So I think that's significant for a few different things. It talks about the problem that we have here on our roadways, but also goes to show you that Vermont does have a very good DRE or DEC program. As an instructor, I'm always striving to make that a better program. But that's just a little highlight there. Also what do DRDs do? Obviously, we respond to evaluations. We take part in a lot of community outreach and education. Vermont State Police, couple of years ago, started what we call major crash response. And what that is, is anytime there's a serious body injury or fatal crash that occurs on our highways, a DRE should also be responding to that scene. We actually tried to send a number of DREs if possible with the Vermont State Police crash team. And the reason we started doing that is because nationally, we started seeing an issue where officers would respond to these scenes, meet with an operator, whether we consider the gun to be the at fault operator or someone who would be considered the victim in that case. Officers, we saw, not frequently, but it did happen where that person was later found to be impaired. And the on scene officer missed it. So what we started doing is whether we suspect impairment or not, we send a DRE. And we've actually found a few times here in the state of Vermont, or even say a number of times, where the DRE was able to opine impairment when the officers originally on scene didn't really pick up on some of those same things. And it really comes down to the expertise that the DRE has to offer. Going to the outreach, we are into the schools such as driver's ed programs, but even speaking to our educators and putting programs on such as DITEP, which is drug impairment. Training for the education professional. Thank you, LT. Which that helps both school teachers and nurses and even mental health professionals identify someone who might be impaired by drugs. And of course, we also or provide expertise for state's attorneys in case reviews. One of the things to highlight in Vermont is we are unable to get a conviction or prove a case of someone who's under the influence of drugs without an expert opinion, which typically comes through our DREs. So if a DRE doesn't respond to a particular case, we're unable to prove or hold that person accountable in the court of law, which also goes to show we're not showing the whole story of the problem at all. Vermont, over the years, I've been since COVID, so 2019 in our DEC program, and our response rates went from like the 50s to now we're sitting right around seventy percent to seventy five percent. So we're definitely increasing our responses. We're doing a lot better job. But the thing to highlight is it could definitely be better because that twenty five percent of the cases that we're not responding to, we're not getting the information. We're not getting the justice that Vermont deserves and needs. And that's kind of most of my comments here. I'm happy to take any questions that anyone has.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: Thank you for this. Just curious, what types of drug impairment are you and your team finding for the scene of an accident?

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: So when we respond to crashes, I guess I'll highlight two things. One, there's many times where we meet with at fault and possibly a victim of a crash, and we opine that they're not impaired, which is obviously fantastic news on our end. But what type of impairments or what drugs are we specifically seeing in those cases? I don't have the data in front of me. But as a program, we're still seeing cannabis narcotic analgesics in past couple of years. We're seeing an increased stimulants now, which are starting to outpace our narcotics as far as cause of impairment. Does that answer your question? Again, so cannabis stimulants like cocaine? Yeah, cocaine, methamphetamines would be considered stimulants. Cannabis would be marijuana. And then narcotic analgesics could be heroin, fentanyl, and other prescription medications as well. And is

[Representative Mollie Burke]: there test a you're giving them, is your team trained and observing and evaluating based on?

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: So DREs take part in a two week school where they get the base information. That's our DRE school. And then they spend a week in field training, where under the watchful eye of an instructor, they're actually meeting with people that are impaired or suspected to be impaired by drugs. And they'll do a 12 step process, which normally takes about thirty minutes to an hour to complete. And at the end of that, the DRE will first opine whether or not the person's impaired. Then they'll determine whether that impairment is coming from a medical event or chemical driven drugs. And then they'll even define what drug category or categories is impairing that person. Because we're frequently seeing that it's not just one drug category. It's multiple drug categories. People are typically on this thing.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Go ahead.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Thank you. Can or do municipal law enforcement officers, can they be trained, or are you training them to do this?

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: Yep. So Vermont's DEC program consists of both state police inspectors, Department of Liquor and Lottery, deputy sheriffs, and municipalities. So they're all in the state from all different agencies of the 44 that we have.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: Thank you.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Representative Pouch? Yeah, so to

[Representative Powell]: identify if somebody appeared as impaired based on your criteria, the exact criteria, is it always followed up by an actual blood test or something that confirms it? Does it have to be confirmed in that way? How does that sort of follow-up?

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: Yeah. So there's a lot of answers to that particular question. But what does a normal DUI drug case look like in the state of Vermont? It starts out with the officer stopping a vehicle or having contact with the motor vehicle, whether that's a crash, motor vehicle violation, or community caretaking stop. That officer would be trained to observe indicators of impairment. They will screen them. If they suspect that alcohol is not the case, go then page a DRE. A DRE response, whether they have one on ship that they know can respond, or we'll send out a page for a DRE through a text message, phone call, and an email. So sometimes, DREs are coming as far as an hour sometimes to get to these cases. The DRE would then meet with that person, do the evaluation, which thirty minutes to an hour, as I said, as long as everything goes without any hiccups. At

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: the end

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: of that, if a DRE opines impairment, they would then instruct the applicant to go forth and ask for a blood sample. A blood sample may or may not be taken. Obviously, it depends on the willingness of the participant. If they do refuse, we would seek a warrant for their blood, which, again, they could refuse. We recently just pushed through the law for a warrant refusal in that case. And then, obviously, we'd go off to the hospital and draw a sample of that. Now, the DRE opinion is the expert testimony that would be introduced as evidence. And obviously, if we had a blood sample, that just makes the opinion that much stronger in court. But not every case would we have a blood test. And also, are times where a blood test might differ than the DRE opinion. Typically, what we're seeing there is the more drug interactions that we have, it's not going to look like a normal case. So if you have, for example, someone who's under the influence of stimulants, if we get to them later on in their impairment curve, they could possibly look like a narcotic analgesic. So that's one where DRE's opinion is definitely correct in impairment, chemical driven, but might be wrong on category. That's probably a simplified answer. Does that answer your question?

[Representative Powell]: Yeah, no, that does. Thank you, Merrill.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: So Ben and I came on together twenty one years ago, so my technology advancement is just as much as his. Let's see if I'm any better at it here. Yeah. Yeah. Can I go to the full screen?

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: I still have a copy of that.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Cool. Here.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: This one here? Yeah. That's gonna get

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: me I just wanna get the whole screen off. Yeah. I

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: don't think you can do that.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Okay. I can try this.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: I think you can see.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Okay.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: You can just scroll down. Okay.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Can we read that? I want to make sure that I'm sharing. So, morning. I'm Lieutenant Paul Ratton of the Vermont State Police Special Operations Unit and the executive officer. That unit encompasses traffic safety as well as the crash reconstruction team, our full time team member who is here and will speak in a little bit, includes the K-nine program, the UAS program, the Marine Division and Rec Enforcement program, and I'm also the commander of the Monstake Police Bomb Squad Team. So, a few hats. Then, so what I'll do today is I'll talk a little bit about a VSP perspective on traffic safety data and where we're at. And I know there's been some questions already by the committee about a ten year data, but I kind of did a three year example from 'twenty two to 'twenty four, and that was completed data. '25 data is still kind of coming in as far as causation of crashes for impairment and such. But I can show you an example of what the Vermont State Police has done in the course of the last few years, and I can also get ten years as requested. But there was a comment made earlier about pre COVID motor vehicle enforcement and post COVID motor vehicle enforcement and about how it was more and less, and that that's an accurate statement. Pre COVID, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, Vermont State Police were in the sixty sixty five thousand motor vehicle stock range post COVID. Through the COVID era, there were some things that came out about reduction of exposure to COVID. We didn't know how to handle it as a community, as a society, and we didn't want one trooper to interact with someone and then come into a barracks, interact with the whole barracks, and now you have an entire county without, say, troopers. So, was motor vehicle enforcement duties were restricted to just the most egregious activities. Aggressive driving, impaired driving, some of the most common factors used that we recognize in motor vehicle serious injury crashes and fatal crashes. Those were the things that we were looking after during the COVID period. So, post COVID, it's kind of a perfect storm, if you will. We had some societal changes of what their expectation of what law enforcement would look like through national events. Some of that included support for and support less of police. Personally, I think here in Vermont, we didn't experience a whole lot of lack of support. I think our support stayed the same. We received a lot of support in comparison to what some other law enforcement agencies around the country were receiving. From that, though, we started seeing things like reduction in people applying to become police officers. That has led to significant vacancies that we still carry today. That's a thing that we're still kind of overcome. And unfortunately, things that happen, they don't quickly correct themselves when the news cycle or the Twitter goes away in a week, that stuff perpetuates for a long time. So, for us to recover from vacancies is a years long process. That doesn't involve just VSP trying to put through 30 people to the academy. It's trying to get the candidates in the door to begin with and understand what they're going to bring to the new way of policing, the way that Vermont is expected to be policed, and then what we expect as members in our agency, and how they're going to act. So, we had no policy changes on what we're going to do for enforcement. It wasn't a policy change to say, You will or you shall not do such and such. It's always been the same that it's a cornerstone to our strategic plan to reduce motor vehicle crashes of fatalities and serious bodily injuries. That's reiterated over and over again in our strategic plan. Every year, we're looking at least five percent reduction for motor vehicle fatalities. And what has changed, though, is what the expectation is during traffic stops. We didn't want troopers to get out of their vehicle, button the hat onto their head, brimmed down, can't see, walk up, papers, take it, go. We understood that there was an important piece the interaction with the public. And that is there's an education piece and there's an enforcement piece. Education, we commonly refer to as warnings. Enforcement, we commonly refer to as tickets. And what we're seeing is that troopers really took to education piece. It's saying, listen, the reason I'm here today intersection and pulling you over because you rolled through that stop sign without coming to a complete stop. We had three crashes at this intersection last year that included people not stopping completely at the stop sign. So, here's where we're at. As with any data that we gather, we gather it over a period of time and we go back and look at it and we see how effective it actually is. And what we're seeing is that majority of our traffic stops ranged, We went from tickets to warnings. We went beyond the fiftyfifty sweet spot that we're feeling. We went heavy into the warning piece. And then, I'll show you some data here in a second, but what we're constantly getting back from our partners at VTrans, we work very closely with, Vermont Agency of Transportation and the Vermont Highway Safety Office, Mandy Chatty is here today, and she's our statewide crash expert. Everything to do with crashes comes from her office, and I call her usually three times a week when we're talking about crashes. And what we're seeing, on average, speeding, distracted driving, unbelted occupants, and impairment are four leading causes of our fatal crashes in Vermont, historically, over the past five, ten plus years. Those are the things that are driving this. So, as an agency, and what I do is, and I'm in the midst of it right now, is traveling to barracks to barracks. And I'm showing each barracks how their barracks stack up to the rest of the state on just old violations. Like, okay, you're issuing a ticket for you issued three tickets for 30 and over. Okay? But you also issued 30 warnings for people traveling 30 miles an hour and over. Maybe that has to be something that we look at as a barracks and say, Okay, how many of your fatal crashes involve excessive speed, and how many motor vehicle stops involve warnings? Maybe that's a correlation where we That goes to enforcement versus education. Or is our education not enough and we need to go out into the community anymore? Yes, ma'am.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: If you would, could you just repeat the four categories?

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Yes, I'm gonna actually get into that. Have a chart coming up. But what I wanted to show here with this first slide is there's always questions about how many tickets can be issued to start reducing our crashes. And nationally, you won't find a number. Stateside, you won't find a number that if you issue X amount of tickets, your crashes will go down. Your major injury crash will go down, your failed crash will go down. There's just not data to support that. What we see here in Vermont is typically what we see nationally. We're not necessarily not on all cases, but not necessarily immune from what's happening nationally. And you won't find that if state police go out there and write 100,000 tickets tomorrow, our fatal crashes will come to zero. It just doesn't happen. And that's what this first chart is showing over the course of the years. As our traffic stops increase over the course of the last three years, tickets and warnings, our crashes were kind of our major crashes involving injuries and fatalities combined, kind of stayed the same. So, that's just putting the numbers on a chart so we can

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: all see that. And then, what you see down here in our next chart is major crashes by year. It would be helpful on the stops if we had the linear ten years. It it's hard to judge with stops versus tickets, And you're telling us that it's more now into education than it's hard to judge all of those until we get a clearer picture.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Absolutely, yes. And I can I understand the ten year timeframe and when we do a lot of our statistics? And we've had Mandy in touch

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Mandy's with great.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: So what I've done here is this is a major crash by year by barracks. So, what this shows is by barracks over the course, let me get down there so you can see. So, by year, where our major crashes have occurred. So, we take the data from earlier, which I showed you about how barracks respond to their traffic enforcement, and then also how that correlates to major crashes. And there's the majority of the crashes are going in the right direction by the barracks. And there's a few that we have some anomalies, and we're trying to figure out what does that mean. Does that mean that they need to where the crashes occurred, types of crashes they are, and then how can we address those? And some of this is reactive. It's all reactive with the data that we collect from the previous year.

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: I'm sorry, Brian.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Would you mind backing up to the slide before this for just a second? Sure. Did I understand that top or that line, the blue line motor vehicle stops between 20,000 and about just shy of 30,000?

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Just shy.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Okay. Just to clarify, did you testify earlier that pre COVID, were at 65,000 on average?

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: About 2,018 ish, we're right around 65, 68,000.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: So from Honor's experience of 50% less interactions with the state police today than they did ten years ago?

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: There there are there are there was that reduction in motor vehicle interactions from, yes, 10 from 2018. Thank you very much.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: And I would back that up. This is the data that came from the court administrator yesterday, Terry Herzog. For example, in 2019, speeding violations by calendar year, there were 42,450. The low was 22 at 18,200. We are at 25, 20,600. Very much like your stops, there's half the number of stops last year that they were ten years ago, and there are less than half the number of tickets. So we're just trying to figure out from the numbers what this all looks like. And so if we had ten years, it would be helpful.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Absolutely. And I can get that data, I can go back and get our traffic data, I will provide the ten year timeframe and what that looks like. And as I mentioned earlier, kind of in the opening, that there isn't just one particular event that caused those numbers to be so different from 2018 to today. There's a series of events. I'll give you an example. When I came on in 2005, Paul Ravlin was My standard was if I was getting out of the car, you were likely getting a ticket because what I felt your actions were getting my attention in what it was, typically speeding or aggressive driving, that warranted a ticket. It's all discretion. State police, no law enforcement agency in Vermont, for that matter, has a quota. Like, you must write this many tickets. You must make this many traffic stops, that doesn't exist. That's old school '80s movie stuff, that's not a Vermont, a real live police thing. But it's always up to the discretion of the officer on what gets issued. And then, generationally, as some younger troops came on, there was conversations about, I stopped this car for two violations. Do I give them two tickets? And then now I'm issuing a motorist in Vermont $500 worth of tickets, four points on their license, and then it starts going down that line of, I'm getting away from the point of enforcing this and changing this behavior to actually becoming over punitive. So, lot of that mindsets on what am I actually doing. So, that changed. And then, we had nationwide events, like I said, with the George Floyd event certainly caused all law enforcement agencies to review on how communities want them to be policed, how they want the police to police them, right? And we weren't immune from that. We had to sit back and review and say, Okay, how are we best serving Vermonters? Is this what we need to do? Not only on the highways, but in all of our law enforcement. State police, as you know, are sometimes the primary law enforcement in most rural towns. So, it's trying to figure that out. And then COVID, and then also with the staffing issues. So, there's a series of things that we're dealing with as an agency to try to ensure that we're providing Vermonters the correct service that they deserve and want, at the same time dealing with all the calls for service, sort of staffing as everyone is. And I don't wanna keep going back to that, but that is a significant thing. When you're carrying 50 plus vacancies, that's five troopers per barracks on average. That's five people you're missing per office. But the caseloads still come in, the domestic violence, the burglaries, the stolen cars, the motor vehicle crashes. That still happens with five less people per barracks on average. And that's not counting military vacancies, folks out on injury, which then that vacancy can get upwards around sixteen, seventy. But there is What I will stress is there is a constant review of the data. Every weekly, the data gets put into files that command staff can see and say, okay, here's where we're at. Make sure that we're not getting too far off center and then addressing this. So, here's the chart that we mentioned earlier about

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: have a question.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Oh, I'm sorry.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: Just one question. When you provide that ten year data, could you include staffing levels going back ten years also? I will Or try to.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Try to make that as accurate as possible, yes. I can't confirm that that's the case, but I will work to see what our staffing looked like

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: at that time. And just so we did ask, as the tickets are written and the revenue that comes in offering those tickets, we did ask the court administrator to come back with us with because we're writing less than half the tickets, how much less revenue are we bringing in? The other side of that is how much is going out the door to do this. So will be important for us to have both sides. Absolutely. That makes complete sense. Senator Harrison.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Thank you. And thanks for being here. It's a huge job, and there's a lot of sometimes conflicting just issues that you need to deal with. So I definitely understand that. Just this is bit of a detail, but you said something about 30 miles over the speed limit when you were explaining about education and, obviously, education is wonderful, so thank you for that. But to me, 30 miles over the speed limit on the interstate, the person knows that they're doing the wrong thing or they're impaired and don't know. But to me, that seems like something that would be an easy directive to say, You get a ticket if you're 30 miles off the speed limit on the interstate. Do you have the ability to make those kinds of directions?

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Yeah. And I use 30 as an example because on secondary roadways, that can be followed up with an arrest. So, the person may be arrested for negligent operation or excessive speed, but they'll also be getting Maybe the trooper issues the warning at the same time. Because our policy for motor vehicle work, guess I stand corrected, there's no policy, but our policy on motor vehicle work is that it shall be documented by paper. So, there's no verbal warnings. So, any interaction that a trooper has when someone in a motor vehicle stop will be documented by either a written warning or a written ticket. So, in that case, when I go to that barracks, I'm saying, You wrote 30 tickets for going 30 and over, but you have 30 warnings. It may be explained, and the reason I mentioned that, because there's data that shows that, it may be explained that those 30 tickets were issued on the back of 30 citations that the person was arrested for. So there is discretion in there. I don't know if they're all that way, but that's the type of information that we're constantly looking at about contributing factors to major crashes. And if we see data that states, okay, we have x amount of tickets for 21 to 30 and x amount of tickets and warnings for 30 and over, what are the warnings about? Why are you choosing to educate here versus enforce? And so, was the point of that, was that that's a constant review of our traffic safety data and our motor vehicle work, is to say, What are your thought process here? So, we're not missing the mark on maybe there is a piece of education that we're missing. Maybe it's education to the public, maybe it's education to the troopers. That's the constant review happening there.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Right. So just to be clear, so the expectation, someone going 95 on the interstate and a trooper has an interaction with them, there would be some sort of something more than just, Hey, you're going too fast.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: It wouldn't be a wag of the finger. There would be a written warning or a written ticket issued at that point.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Or a

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Or a citation for easily say negligent operation. Excessive speed is often used for secondary roadways where the speed limit they're doing at least 30 over and they're going at least 60 miles an hour. There's some stuff in the law that makes it that way. So, that can be a negative operation or excessive speed if you're doing 30 over. So, if you have a secondary roadway that's 50 and they're doing 80 or 85. There is any motor vehicle stop is the outcome is at the discretion of the issuing officer. So, it could be a ticket, could be a warning. Criminal offenses are The expectation is they will be arrested for the criminal offense. There is no hard line that says, if someone is doing a 100 miles an hour on the interstate, there's no hard line that says, You shall arrest that person. There's no line that We don't have a policy that says you will. The expectation is that you will, but there's no hard line that says that.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Senator White and Representative

[Senator Becca White (Vice Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: you, Mr. Harris. Unless you have No. Well, I just wanted to say I really appreciate your reflection on the murder of George Floyd because I know that that was at least psychologically a big break for me with my affinity for law enforcement. That was a shocking and a terrible event. And I think we're all experiencing something similar with ICE right now and seeing just the brutality of what they're doing. And I really appreciate you reflecting on that and that moment of change for us as a nation, especially when we saw an over pulling over, or like a higher propensity to pull over people of color in our data, which I think reflected poorly on us as a state. So I really appreciate you reflecting on that. And I just wanted to know what I just wanna make sure that you're hearing from us. We had some testimony from Ms. Chadney around the number of fatalities and injuries. And when I look at the numbers, we're kind of similar to where we were pre COVID. So even though we're having, and there's different variations and people can look at the data for themselves, but we're similar in our average of injuries, serious injuries and deaths to right around COVID. So even though we've dropped, to your estimate, so drastically in enforcement, we haven't seen a huge spike. We haven't seen a double of that. So I think your transition and moving towards education actually reflects really well because we didn't see a huge spike. It seems that people we're not having the same level of serious injuries you might expect with that drop of enforcement. So I appreciate that. But my main question is related to pedestrian deaths, because that's my big concern, is we have people who are just walking and getting run down. So I'm wondering if you're seeing that more related to municipal law enforcement because it's in downtowns or where people are. Or is that more state police? Like, where are you seeing an increase in pedestrian deaths or enforcement of speeding or other impairments in Sure.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: And I'll speak to that. I kind of want to be a wave top answer on that because I have Sergeant Hine here, who's full time crash reconstructionist. And anytime that there's a fatal crash, his phone rings anywhere in the state for any department. And he's our crash reconstruction team leader and can speak a little bit more to that. But when any fatality occurs, as mentioned earlier by Inspector Knight, who I had the pleasure of working many, many years with, And I myself was a DRE for eight years. So, I understand this process. And then also, to his point, when there's a fatal crash of any type, that major crash response that gets initiated with a page to a DRE, page to crash reconstruction, and that gets investigated as a team, multifaceted team. The causation of a fatal crash isn't just this car hit this car, and this is what happened. There is so much information that comes from these things. Average report is in the 50 to 60 page range for a fatal crash narrative. And causation is often, everyone wants to know what happened. Some of the fatal crashes that included pedestrians included pedestrians wearing dark clothing, being impaired, not using designated crosswalks. And I don't want to say it's their fault that they got hit and they've been killed. What I'm saying is that part of the causation is, are they using crosswalks where folks are expecting them to be? Are they crossing in front of a vehicle and they're impaired and not making good judgments, now that person is not And then, you may have an impaired operator too, right? So, that's double bad. But there has been several where, I won't say by no fault of the operator, but the circumstances that come into play is just that. We're not using where, as a driver, we may expect to see a person at a crosswalk and our sensitive awareness are heightened or reduced visibility in a non lighted roadway and someone's wearing darker clothes. And a lot of cars come with videos nowadays. And we also get There was one particular crash that I remember witnessing the video of a pedestrian crash, and we watched it three or four times. And it's a matter of less than a half a second before the person comes in the view of headlights before there's a collision with vehicle. And I don't know how to avoid that crash. So, I wanna wave top that for me, but I would like to have Sergeant Heinz speak more into what he's seen maybe as trends for pedestrian crashes and maybe what his findings are. I would just rather have it come from the expert, if that's okay.

[Senator Becca White (Vice Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Yeah, sure. Really appreciate that. And yes, I'm married to someone who's a dispatcher, if I'm not wearing a bright fluorescent outfit past 04:30PM, I'm getting in trouble. So there's certainly some education we can do for pedestrians as well. So thank you for raising the call.

[Representative Powell]: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for your testimony. A couple of questions and if you're gonna address it later on, just let me know. One is on, I don't know if you're familiar with the term super speeders where the excess speeding or traffic light, running red lights and whatnot, there's just a small portion of people who are doing it constantly. And so how do you address that? Do you see that as an issue? How do you address that? That's question number one. And then the other question is automated traffic enforcement systems. I don't believe we have really other than we saw the DMV is using some which seems successful. Is there any discussion, advancement, moving toward that technology as a way to help our state police and law enforcement in traffic safety. To

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: answer your first question, the super speeders, I'm not familiar with that particular term, but what happens when I go home at 05:00 is I take this uniform off and then I'm driving my personal vehicle around And I see exactly everything like, Man, if I was working, I would write 10 tickets in this drive from here to here. So, I see the constant change in an overall, and this is anecdotally, behavior in driving where it just seems like there's a shortness in patients. Folks wanna be where they're not. If I'm here, I need to be over there. If I'm over there, need to be over there. And it's constant getting to where they need to be aggressively. Oftentimes, it's stop lights or stop signs. They're stretching the yellow lights to red lights, and they're rolling through stop signs and such. And that's behavior that we constantly focus on as far as contributing factors to motor vehicle crashes. So, those are constant conversations that I hear are happening amongst the troopers. We're like, This isn't happening here. This isn't what we're doing. And quite frankly, we partner with Agency of Transportation for specific enforcement grants. Those are federal grants that we applied for and we get awarded, and they will go towards these contributing factors. So, we have a DUI grant. So, the troopers working overtime just to focus on impaired driving. So, their focus will be if they see this egregious behavior that is indicative of impairment. That's what their sole focus is. They're not answering crashes or calls for service. They're just doing that. We have occupant protection, where they're focusing on folks that are child seat belt, children wearing seat belts and properly belted, and then occupants wearing seat belts. Then we have another one that's distracted driving, where they're sole focus for that shift on overtime is looking for folks that are using cell phones and texting. And we had a great bill passed last year defining use because it got into our court systems about what use looks like. So, had some great work here at the State House to make sure that a phone in your hand is considered use, and we can help combat the distracted driving portion of that, and then impairment. So we utilize these grants on top of troopers' day to day work. So if a trooper gets tied up with a burglary, just this morning, heard this call come in up in Williston, where I'm thinking those troops are gonna be tied up with that all day. And so, that's two troopers not doing traffic enforcement. But you might have two troopers coming on tonight or this afternoon to do just strictly traffic enforcement with these grants to combat those aggressive drivers inattention and the folks who are doing that. When it comes to automating traffic enforcement, I know it's been brought up by both committees over the past couple of years. At this point, it's a non issue for us because it's not something that's in play. And I would defer any of that, basically the Agency of Transportation, as to where we stand with that and what the process is for, if ever, to implement something like that. Okay, thanks. Yes.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: That brings up it would be helpful to see the history of grants and for speeding for DUI, it would be interesting to see where all of that is in the piece too. It doesn't appear from the data that we look at that the super speeders, those that are over from 31 miles an hour over the speed limit has changed. Wow. It's really from the data that we've got in the range of the lower and say 10 to 31 miles over, those areas are down a lot. I'm trying to understand where all of us is. Now, just as clarification, data you received, was that traffic tickets issued or traffic stops total? Traffic tickets. Traffic tickets. I asked you for the stops that you made versus the tickets.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Warnings in the tickets. Okay. Just clarifying that, sir. I'll And have

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: I would just say from a non educated, and not having everything here, about two thirds of the people that got stopped when it was 60,000 got a ticket. And today about two thirds of the people that get stopped when they get a ticket. So the assertion that we're doing more education, it's hard for me to see that in the numbers, we don't have all these. All

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: right, and

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: then just to I'm stealing this from Mandy Schott. This is something we get every Tuesday, and this is kind of how we, and you may have seen this chart before, but it's showing these are statewide numbers, not just VSP numbers. And the 2025 data is still pending as far as toxicologies and so forth. But this is information that we get as related to causation of fatal crashes. And a couple of things that just to highlight here is if you look at operators suspected of driving under the influence of drugs only, outpaces alcohol only, usually by double, and that's beyond 2021. That goes back close to your ten year mark, where drugs only will outpace alcohol only. And we talk about when we say DUI, we always think of the person with the beer or liquor. Impaired driving is what it's often referred to now as includes it could be impaired by sleep. If you're sleep deprived, it could be impaired by alcohol, it could be impaired by drugs, or a combination of both, right? And then, the number that you see in green, the active cannabis, drugs are confirmed in the system, that's the number of cases that involve cannabis, where drugs have been confirmed the drug was cannabis involved. Yes, impaired driving is still a significant factor, and this is where that shows that. And then, down below here, the next one is that we're looking at for seat belt use and the type of the vehicle. I mentioned we had nine pedestrian fatalities this year, which is significantly more than we've had in years past, except we back down to twenty twenty one. And that is required, what is the causation of that? What changed? It we need more lighted intersections? Do we need raised intersections? What do we need? And that's what will come from this data, is figuring out what that is. And then, unbelted occupants. As you can see, we kind of made some headway in 2024 as partners. VSP is not on an island. VSP is not alone. We work very closely with our partners at Agency of Transportation, VTrans, Vermont Highway Safety Office. There's a million committees that I'm a part of where we're constantly looking at this data and how we can make this better and how does Vermont kind of break away from national trends. We don't want to be in the national trends. We want to be better than the national trends, right? And we constantly are reviewing all this data. And one of the things as a whole was the seat belt usage. In the middle of 2025, we're in the high, we're above 60% of unbelted occupants crashing and being killed. So, we've dropped down about 56 ish at the 2025. So, that's just another thing is occupant protection. We understand that there's not a primary seatbelt law. If there is a motor vehicle stop for something other than the seatbelt, such as speed, a ticket has to be issued to that person. There has to be a fine associated with that first ticket in order for them to get a ticket for the seatbelt violation, as it's a secondary violation. And the reason I bring that up is I've been a part of Title 23, which is our motor vehicle law book. I've been a part of the committee that looked at page by page, every single one, every single violation. And going through that and wondering if we should change them to secondary violation to keep them the same as primary or if there's recommendations to be changed. So, this is a constant thing that we're doing. It's not just a one off. This is years and years of data study and repeated data study to make sure we take the stuff we just learned from '25 and how do we apply it to '26 to ensure that that overall fatal number is going in the right direction. One of the worst ceremonies that we

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: attend personally is when we did the

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Red Ribbon ceremony, we're laying on another 50 something, 70 something fatal crash. Statistics, ribbons to this red ribbon tree. And those are folks that are not sitting at a dinner table for the holidays. It's terrible. And these are lasting effects. Once the crash is cleaned up and we're gone, we're talking to family members for weeks and months after that, giving back personal property and listening to that. So major injury and fatal crashes are not just certainly, to to members of enforcement in Vermont, I can speak probably for everyone, it's not just the number, it's of this is a person that we saw, and a family that we dealt with. So, we take it very seriously. And then just lastly, as a whole, these are VSP numbers, what it looks like for us. In 2025, Vermont State Police responded to 35 fatal crashes, which resulted in thirty six fatalities. Nineteen of those were single vehicle crashes, fifteen of those were two vehicle crashes, one was a three vehicle crash, and five of those involved a commercial motor vehicle at some way, which at that point we would call in our partners at DMV to help with that investigation. And then in 2024, VSP had thirty eight fatal crashes resulting in thirty eight fatalities. Thirty five of those were single vehicle crashes, two were two vehicle crashes, and one was a commercial vehicle crash. So, again, to your point, Senator White, was that, is the education working and we're not going up in fatals, even though enforcement is waning? Or because our numbers haven't changed, we're not doing a good enough job? So that's where we constantly are trying to figure out how to make sure we're doing the right things.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: I feel like I have to say there's also a significant and annual increase in the safety of vehicles and operation. So that has potentially could cover lots of the impacts of education and other pieces. But the vehicles that are out there today, people don't die in this thing, crash that they died, substantially previously. So we'll never gonna be able to quantify that exactly.

[Unidentified committee staff/A-V operator]: Yes.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: I certainly don't wanna, in any way, think that there's a direct leap to be defined without considering a lot of other factors. Of course. That is one of the largest, that's out there is that you can the safety of the vehicles are dramatically better than they were in the ten year data. I'm sorry. I just I wanna make sure that it's not all about what your troopers are doing every day, effort to help Vermonters be safe on the roads, and then there's other factors substantially impacts. Yeah.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: So Thank you for pointing out.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: We're getting close on time. I'd certainly like to hear, what your colleague has, if we can.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Yes, absolutely.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Thank you. So before we go, we're going to, in our committee, will have people backing on this. And from what would be helpful for us in our committee is we've asked all the questions around a number of different areas to get the 10 bill. If we had estimates from public safety on the number of hours that were spent globally each year, number of hours spent on traffic safety, and produce that over a ten year basis, that would be helpful. It would be nice to be able to see 2025 versus the last ten years where all of that, how many hours have been spent on that?

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: I will work to get that as accurate as possible. It may be just a trooper, It

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: may not be perfect, and I understand that, but if we could do some sort have some sort of a measurement, it would be helpful.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Yeah. The reason I so read just the reason I mentioned it as for example, for me, I may be sitting in a u-turn doing traffic safety. I'll get called to burglary, and on the way the on the way back, I might stop another car.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: So is it We've asked about staffing levels, and we want that. But if there must be some estimate that you do about how many hours a trooper is sitting, for example, on the interstate, traffic versus other. And and it may not be perfect, but some estimate out of Okay.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: I I I will work to to try to get that information for you, senator.

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: Thank you very much. Alright. Thank you.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: I do have I'm just gonna say this. Our community does have a hard stop in about ten minutes, and we're gonna have to move. We have testimony coming from people on the West Coast.

[Lieutenant Paul Ratton, Vermont State Police (Special Operations Unit)]: Oh my goodness.

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: And so it's pretty early for them.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: Oh, what were you talking about?

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: Good morning, members of the committee. My name is Sergeant Chris Lyon. I currently work for the Vermont City Police. Radlan mentioned during his testimony, I'm currently the commander of the crash reconstruction team. I usually refer to it as CRT, so if I identify that as that during my testimony, that's what that

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: was referring to.

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: So the CRT, or crash reconstruction team, gets involved anytime there's a serious flight injury crash in fatality, and the person who primarily caused the crash survived, and so thus there's some sort of criminal culpability there. And so that's when we typically get involved. We'll always get involved when the event data recorder or black box, if you will, and the vehicle needs to be downloaded because we're the only game in the state, so to speak, that can perform that with the technology and so forth that we have. And I'm trying to share my screen here. I think I did it. And then so one of the things that lieutenant Radlan asked me to speak about, was the topic of runway drivers. And so the way this project, if you will, began several years ago, I think it was around during COVID time, I started to see several crashes or serious crashes that were the result of a wrong way driver. And so, I started doing some research and noticed that there was a lot more incidences. And so, thus, my COVID project, I definitely call it sometimes, was born. And so, I kept track of those incidences throughout the years. And so, this is an overall 1,000 foot view, if you will, of those long way driver incidences that we've had from 2016 till I know it says 2026 up there, but I input this data at the first week or so of the month. So, I haven't got to January 2026 yet. So, for all intents and purposes, this is from 01/01/2016 through 12/31/2025. Okay. And I also would like to clarify what a wrong way driver is or what this data is comprised of. So the way I've kind of identified it or defined it as it's any time a vehicle travels in the wrong direction on a controlled access highway or limited access highway where there's a defined median. So, it's not just immune to the interstate, but it also combines places like US 4 down in Fairhaven, US 7 down in Bennington, where there's a defined median. And so, that's what I've identified as a wrong way driver. US 5 in St. Johnsbury and so forth. Generally speaking, the last several years, we've had I think the numbers last year, had 117 on these subsequent sentences. The year prior, I think it 109. There was obviously a dip during the pandemic around 2019, 2020, 2021, but we've started to climb back up. And I think it should also be important to note that incidences are identified through CAD, or Computer Automated Dispatch, or Vowcor, if you will. So, anytime someone calls 911 and identifies a wrong way driver, all of sudden that gets transferred to a PSAP somewhere, an incident likely created. Sometimes it's always created. Every dispatcher is different. Everyone's different. Sometimes some dispatcher may wait till they get two or three calls, and then an incident is created. So, thus, I believe these numbers are underreported to some degree. And say someone is driving the wrong direction and they're able to correct themselves within fifteen seconds or so or thirty seconds. And maybe they're on Interstate 91 where there's no traffic at all, so no one calls 911. Just some things to keep in mind. Yes, sir.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: Go ahead.

[Senator Andrew “Andy” Perchlik]: Do you have a theory of why the wrong way crests have increased sensitivity?

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: I do. We'll get into that, but largely, I think it's due to impairment, whether it be alcohol, drugs, or some sort of cognitive impairment. So, think it's kind of a combination of those. And then usually, talk about in a minute here, it's usually during the evening hours or early morning. Identify the area where these are occurring. Generally speaking, it's on Interstate 89. Within 89, that's usually up in the greater Chittenden County area. You also see Interstate 91 over there. And then other controlled access highways would be, like I spoke of earlier, US 7, maybe US 4, those types of places. Inters or excuse me. Route 62 down in Berlin, there's a small area there where people routinely travel the wrong direction.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Yeah, of course.

[Representative Powell]: Quick question. One, we see the increase. Are you attributing it to a real increase or better reporting? That question number one, maybe you can't determine that again. Is this a national trend or a regional?

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: I think we have gotten better at reporting these or collecting that data, if you will. I think there is a national trend, or it's happening across the country. There are other states that have introduced some sort of technology to address these issues or proactively engage this or identify those types of drivers. So, think it's a number of things. But I think generally there is an increase in Vermont, yes. So, this is the breakdown usually. Generally speaking, people are between the ages of 26 to 50, and then a larger population between 51 to 75 years old. The small period there were some cases are expunged. So, I don't know the age of the offender. And to be clear, the only reason why I know the person's age is because they were interacting with law enforcement in some capacity, whether we stopped them or they crashed their car while they were driving on the interstate and we identified the operator, their age, etcetera. This of speaks to your question earlier, Senator. I believe there is some sort of impairment or almost always some impairment that has to do with wrong way driving. That's what this slide suggests or helps to corroborate. And then lastly, this is a histogram of the occurrences or time throughout the day, starting at zero one in the morning all the way through two thousand three hundred hours. So generally speaking, it's in the evening hours, early morning hours.

[Inspector Clay Knight, Vermont DMV (Drug Evaluation and Classification Program)]: So

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: every now and then, we may have an incident during the day. There was just one the other day that I recalling. Those are kind of that's my testimony, if you will, with regard to wrong way drivers. Yes, ma'am. Jennifer?

[Representative Mollie Burke]: On the previous slide,

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: red Yeah.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: It's like unimpaired. What was

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: Why were they unimpaired, or why was such So maybe to Inspector Knight's point earlier, maybe there was a larger number of people that were interacted by law enforcement, but they didn't identify several people as being impaired. So maybe there were some in there that were actually impaired, but they were not arrested for a DUI. And I should have mentioned this earlier, but those that are impaired are people that got a DUI and were driving the wrong way on the interstates or on I can go back to silo. Yes, Sandy.

[Representative Mollie Burke]: I just want to say that I expect to hear a bit more about this hanging out today, but initial talk about some type of technology that is able to identify wrong way drivers as they're entering the highway, and I don't know if it's sending them, but I'm really excited to hear more about this technology. As someone who represents a district that lost five students in a row of our driving. Understand.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: And I

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: can briefly talk about it. I have done some research on the topics, but there are companies out there that the technology, essentially, you have because generally, people enter via an on ramp or off ramp and go the wrong direction. That's usually how it happens. Every once in a while, we have a vehicle that travels across the median and is thus going the wrong way. But there's technology out there that detects a vehicle moving in the wrong direction at that off ramp. So it will either flash a wrong way sign to alert people. There's other more advanced systems that will alert a PSAP or public safety answering point or dispatch center to alert for dispatch troopers or law enforcement to that area to get there quicker. It's usually we're just relying on the general public or general populace to report these sentences. So sometimes there is some between the law enforcement's response and when we can actually get there. That's generally what the system would entail.

[Lieutenant Ben Shulpe, Vermont DMV Enforcement & Safety Division (Northeast Sector)]: Representative McCollins?

[Representative Mollie Burke]: I'm wondering if it's weather related sometimes.

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: They weather related? Do you put

[Representative Mollie Burke]: it down to people are traveling too fast for the conditions? I'm just thinking in Vermont, ice. Is that ever factored into or written down on the report?

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: That'd be really hard to quantify. What you determine as fog is maybe a little bit different. Maybe it's really dense fog. But, yeah, I'm sure it's a possibility. I

[Representative Mollie Burke]: I don't know.

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: A question and it's a question. I think it's unbelievable. It's over there every day. I've never I

[Representative Mollie Burke]: been on tube before. I'm sure

[Senator Wendy Harrison (Clerk, Senate Transportation Committee)]: it was funny and it was icy. Yeah.

[Sergeant Chris Lyon, Vermont State Police (Crash Reconstruction Team Commander)]: Yeah, I imagine that that can be a contributing factor sometimes. But like I said, that can be difficult to quantify. Thank

[Unidentified Chair (House Transportation Committee)]: you. Well, I very much appreciate your testimony. I think one of those areas that perhaps we'll have to dig into a little bit further in the committee. Appreciate all of you coming in and presenting at the time frame that we had. And I apologize to everybody for running over. And I would say this won't be the last time that

[Senator Richard Westman (Chair, Senate Transportation Committee)]: we have all of you. But those of you that weren't on schedule, but not we we will be back around on this. I would say to my committee