Recording in progress.

Good morning, everybody.

I would like to call to order this public hearing on the Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety.

I am Councilmember Brooke Pinto, representing Ward 2 and chairwoman of the committee.

The time is 1049 a.m.

on Wednesday, March 18th, and we are conducting this public hearing in person in room 500 of the John A.

Wilson building and streaming on the DC Council's website and YouTube and X at CM Brook Pinto.

Thank you to everybody joining us today.

We are considering several bills before the committee today.

Bill 26 480, ensuring access to supporting engagement or ease for DOC Residents Act of 2025.

Bill 26-599, Emergency Medical Services Clarification Act of 2026, Bill 26-456, E911 Modernization Amendment Act of 2025, and Bill 26-572 to the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026.

The first bill we're discussing today is Bill 26-480, ensuring access to supporting engagement or ease for DOC residents of 2025.

This bill would codify the right of DOC residents to testify before the DC Council and engage with their ANC commissioner.

Thanks to the Restore the Vote Act of 2020, residents in the Department of Corrections have the right to vote in local and federal elections regardless of their incarceration status.

Since then, we've seen steady increases in civic participation.

Most recently, over 200 DOC residents voted in the 2024 DC primary election.

DOC residents also elect their own ANC commissioner who represents individuals who are housed at the Central Detention Facility and the Correctional Treatment Facility.

However, despite now having voting access, DOC residents are effectively excluded from another core democratic activity, which is testifying at DC council hearings.

This creates a gap for residents to fully participate in the democratic the democratic process.

Voting rights without the ability to participate in the legislative process create an incomplete democracy.

Despite many advancements in technology, allowing DOC residents to participate in council hearings has remained a challenge.

I've continually raised this issue with the agency since at least May of 2023.

I've attempted to work with DOC to provide this access to its residents without legislation for nearly three years.

I'm disappointed that DOC was unable to provide access for residents to testify today on this hearing on this subject.

Some of the barriers that they have raised.

First, limited Wi-Fi connectivity, second, staffing constraints, and third, the view that ANC 7F08 commissioners will sufficiently represent residents' interests.

However, these barriers I believe we can overcome.

The council has accepted remote testimony since the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that the technology and process are feasible.

DOC already uses internet connected tablets and other digital tools to connect residents with outside service providers and educational programs.

Indeed, we expect that ANC 7F08 Commissioner will be able to testify virtually today himself.

Furthermore, while ANC representation is valuable, it is not feasible to assume that one person can accurately convey the thoughts, beliefs of over 2,000 people.

That's why I've introduced this bill before us today.

The Ease Act requires DOC to provide electronic devices and internet access so residents can register for DC council hearings as witnesses, submit written testimony, and deliver oral testimony via video conference at council hearings.

All processes that are available to everyone except those who are incarcerated.

The bill also requires DOC to develop policies and processes that support civic engagement, including educational materials about the legislative process and how residents can participate.

It ensures that there are multiple free communication methods to access their ANC commissioner and removes any potential cost barriers by providing no cost mailing options for testimony and correspondence to the council.

When we draft legislation, especially legislation that impacts DOC jail residents, it's crucial that we hear from residents who will be impacted.

And of course, residents are welcome to testify on any issue that they would like that's facing the DC council.

And it is particularly important to have their input as we conduct oversight of the DC jail where folks are staying.

This will strengthen the democratic participation and lead to better policymaking.

These are not individuals who cannot speak for themselves.

These are parents, family members, and community members with ties to our neighborhoods and all eight wards, and they deserve the same rights to civic engagement as everyone else.

I'm eager to hear from ANC Commissioner Cunningham, who represents residents in the DC jail on the challenges he faces with limited access to his constituency, and I remain hopeful that Director Faust will be amenable to the provisions outlined in this legislation.

Next, we have Bill 26 599, the Emergency Medical Services Clarification Amendment Act of 2026.

This bill aims to improve and protect accuracy in emergency and non-emergency call responses at the Office of Unified Communications, or OUC, home to the DC 911 call center.

The DC 911 call center is responsible for providing fast, professional, and cost effective response to emergency and non-emergency calls in the district.

OUC was established in 2005 to combine the emergency 911 non-emergency and 311 call activities for the Metropolitan Police Department, buyer and emergency medical services, and customer service operations.

Residents and visitors to the district deserve a 911 call center that is efficient, speedy, and accurate.

In past years, the committee and the council received a significant number of complaints from DOC residents about long call to answer waiting times, errors, and transparency issues at the agency.

Operational problems and mistakes at the agency over wrong addresses led to injuries and even tragic deaths.

Since that time, I've worked closely with the agency through oversight and legislation to institute and maintain needed improvements, including the public dashboard for reporting all 911 call errors, to increase transparency and accountability, provisions established in my secure DC Omnibus Amendment, excuse me, Omnibus Amendment Act of 2024, there have been important payoffs and progress in these efforts in terms of efficiency and speed under Director McGaffin's leadership.

In 2023, only 20 only 74% of calls the agency received were answered within 20 seconds or less, following rigorous oversight and work by the agency from fiscal year 2025 to the present of the 1.4 million calls the agency received, now 98% of those calls were answered in 20 seconds or less, well above the national standard.

Likewise, OUC has increased staff, and this committee has funded OUC call taker pay raises and recruitment and retention bonuses to ensure that staffing targets are met.

Whereas in July of 2024, only 13% of shifts met minimal staffing targets.

By July of 2025, 79% of shifts met their staffing targets.

While we have had these crucial improvements in efficiency and speed, further legislation is necessary to improve and protect accuracy in call responses.

The work of this agency is high stakes and in the public interest, any mistake or delay can have life-altering consequences.

My bill is introduced, does two things.

It clarifies the FIRE and EMS Medical Director statute to explicitly codify that the FIRE and EMS Medical Director is also the medical director to OUC to provide oversight supervision and final decision making for all clinical aspects of pre-hospital emergency and medical services, and clarifying the duties of the director.

The bill also confers upon the medical director explicit authority over selecting, revising, and establishing dispatch protocols and response plans regarding emergency medical services, as well as explicit authority over quality assurance of EMS dispatch and emergency medical services, including continuous quality improvement programs.

It also codifies the training requirement that within one year of being hired or for current employees one year of this bill going into effect.

Call takers and dispatchers be certified in emergency medical dispatch, which is training for handling calls for emergency medical services.

Although currently OUC requires call takers and dispatchers to be EMD certified, this requirement is not codified.

This change is necessary to ensure OUC has the national best practices training, regardless of who is in the agency leadership.

This bill would thus ensure that the progress made at and the public trust in this agency are enhanced and protected by making certain that accuracy and transparency and call response match the current gains in efficiency and speed that DC 911 call center has achieved.

I remain open-minded about the solutions, but am committed to working together to get it right.

We'll then turn to another bill, Bill 26 4, excuse me, Bill 26-546, the E911 Modernization Amendment Act of 2025.

This bill was introduced by my colleague, Councilmember Christina Henderson, who's joined us here today, and co-introduced by Councilmember Fruman.

The aim of this bill is to modernize the district's 911 and 311 telecommunications tax and fees and would update the structure and allowable uses of the emergency and non-emergency number telephone calling systems fund.

The bill would also establish an updated service fee on telecommunication services to support the district's emergency communication system.

My hope today is to learn from the agency ways that we can build on this bill to strengthen OUC's funding structure and improve modernization as informed by the agency's technical expertise and expressed needs.

I do want to note this the funding structure and the different fees have become an issue every year during the budget.

And so I'm hopeful that this is the year we make changes that are then sustainable and we can all move forward in a way that everyone can live with to ensure the agency has the funding that it needs.

And last, we'll close with Bill 26-572, the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026, developed in partnership with the Office of the Attorney General and co-introduced my colleague, Councilmember Fruman, which aims to modernize the district's child support system to ensure that families that are on temporary assistance for needy families also receive their full child support payments.

Under current law, the district's child support system prioritizes paying itself back first.

As a result, a portion of child support payments collected on behalf of low-income families is retained by the district and the federal government rather than being passed directly to children and custodial parents.

According to federal law, though, the district can choose to pass through all of the child support it collects to our families directly.

In 2006, the district became one of the first jurisdictions in the country to allow for partial pass through of up to 150 of monthly child support payments.

And in 2025, Councilmember Fruman and I partnered with OAG to increase this path pass through allowable to 200 per month.

However, since that time, several states have surpassed the district to allow for a full pass through, including Illinois and Maryland.

This bill also ensures that all unpaid child support payments which become a debt subject to collection are passed through to the child and custodial parent once collected, regardless of whether that family receives TANF.

Currently, the district collects child support debt and does not pass the payments through to the family if the family currently or previously received TANF.

The federal government will waive its 50% share of the money it would have received from collections of the state owed arrears if the district passes through the payments to families receiving TANF.

Given that the federal government allows this pass through, we should absolutely be taking advantage of this opportunity to get more money into the hands of our DC families.

Finally, the bill modernizes the period of enforceability and statute of limitations for child support collections.

Currently, the child support payments remain enforceable for extended periods of time after the child has reached adulthood.

The bill establishes a clear and uniform enforceability period tied to the emancipation of the youngest child on the child support order, plus a defined post-emancipation period.

Research shows that providing more money directly to families improves childhood outcomes.

We also know that non-custodial parents are more likely to pay monthly child support if their payments go directly to their child and the custodial parent rather than being sent to the government.

We have approximately 36,600 children living in poverty in DC.

I am proud to have introduced this bill along with Councilmember Fruman and in partnership with the Office of the Attorney General to better support our DC families who are struggling to get by.

I look forward to hearing from the public today, fellow council members and our government witnesses about these four bills.

We will be hearing from our virtual witnesses today first to accommodate those who are incarcerated on the Ease bill.

But before we turn to our public witnesses, I want to turn to my colleague, Councilmember Henderson, for any opening statement you may have.

Great.

Thank you, Chair Pinto, and good morning, everyone.

I want to thank the Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, which I used to be a member of, and I want to come back, but it's okay for holding this hearing today.

When a district resident calls 911, they are placing their trust in a system that must work every time without fail.

That call may come from a wireless phone, it might come from a VIO IP line, it could come from a shared family plan, it could come from a prepaid device.

Um, for more than two decades, the district's emergency and non-emergency number telephone calling systems fund has supported core 911 operations, and including call handling and routing.

But that law was written in 2000.

Um, and that was when people only had a single landline.

It's time to update.

Uh, the way residents communicate and the expectations that we have when they reach out for help have changed dramatically, and our funding structure has not kept pace.

Across the country, jurisdictions have been transitioning to next generation 911 systems that allow for residents to reach emergency services through voice, text, photos, video, and more precise geolocation.

The result is a 911 system for us that is underfunded, under-resourced, underprepared for the modernization that district residents deserve.

These upgrades are not just technological improvements, they are critical equity tools as well.

For residents who are deaf or hard of hearing, or experiencing a behavioral health crisis, or facing language barriers, or in situations where it might be unsafe to speak, the ability to communicate nonverbally can be life-saving.

Ensuring modern and accessible systems is essential to building that trust and delivering the effective landscape.

I'm grateful to Director McGaffin and the Office of Unified Communications for their continued work on behalf of district residents.

I also want to thank the staff at OUC who spent a long time with my staff, Marcia Huff, um, learning the intricacies and in and outs of the technology system and this fund.

Um, and I look forward to a candid conversation with OUC, our telecommunication partners, and the committee about where the system stands today and where it needs to go.

Thanks so much.

Well, thank you very much, Councilmember Henderson, for introducing this important bill and spending the time to learn about those intricacies.

It is a um a system that is always in in need of additional support and improvements, and a system that agencies around the country really look to as a model.

And I will also just say for the record, we would love to have you back on the committee at any time.

Um, but thank you for for being here.

Um, we are going to turn to our public witnesses now.

Uh, first who are testifying regarding ease.

I'm gonna call Commissioner Harold Cunningham.

And Commissioner, I understand you'll also be um reading and sharing some testimony from some other folks who are seeking to have their voice heard but are unable to, um, which is a reminder of why this bill is is so necessary.

So, Commissioner Cunningham, um, please accept your invitation to join as a panelist.

Jesse White, Anthony Blankenship, Stacey Littner, Daniel Rosen, Alex Stein, Grace Thomas, and Cinquan Umar Mohammed.

Um, we can hear you.

Go ahead when you're ready, Commissioner.

Good morning, Chairman Pinto and distinguished members of the committee.

My name is Harold Cunningham.

I serve as the ANC commissioner, and I also speak today as someone who survived 33 years of incarceration, including 20 years of solitary refinement.

I want to thank the woman Petro and Deputy Director Wings for this opportunity to speak today and for their willingness to listen to the concerns of incarcerated residents.

I'll come before you today with a heavy responsibility.

I have only a few minutes to speak on behalf of one in 22 million income residents and vote is inside BC jail.

We do not have the opportunity to stand before you themselves.

I must say something honestly.

It is impossible for one person to truly speak for 2200 meetings.

I can raise their concerns, I can share what I see and hear, but no single individual can fully convey the delging pain, frustration and suffering and spirits and those woe.

How can I truly describe the doors of a resident off inside a sale 20 to 23 hours a day?

Not for punishment, but simply because they are in possible.

How can I fully explain the struggles of someone valid with drug addiction with decisability needs treatment?

How can I convey the suffering of a mentally ill resident deteriorate in isolation?

How can I express the voices of thousands of men and women simply who simply want an opportunity for dignity, rehabilitation, and hope?

You need to hear directly from the residents themselves.

Their voices matter, their experiences matter, their humanity matters.

Why would any stack matters?

For 20 years I had no voice, no one spoke for me.

I was voiceless.

I was soundless, and I was invisible.

But I wasn't not alone.

Many of other individuals under the same condition, feeling completely muscled by the system.

That feeling of being silent creates something extremely dangerous.

It creates hopelessness.

It creates depression.

It creates anxiety.

It creates a deep sense of being trapped with no way out.

For many people, those conditions led to suicidal thoughts.

But when someone is finally heard, when someone is finally seen, something powerful happens.

Being heard is therapeutic.

Being seen is healing.

All I am asking is that incarcerated residents have the opportunity to have their voices heard.

I am also respectfully asking that in my capacity as the ANC commissioner representing these residents, I'll be allowed reasonable access to communicate with them, including the ability to periodically make crowds to hear their concerns and communicate directly through the GTL tablet system.

I am not only the ASC, I am the vice chairman ASC commissioner voted in by my ANC peers.

Because if the Department of Progression embraced the transparency communication, DC Jail can become a national example of democratic accountability within a congressional institution.

If the consecrated residents have the right to vote, then they should also have the right to have their fourth deserved.

Enclosure, chairwoman fitto, and members of the committee.

The East Act represent the important steps towards ensuring transparency, accountability, and dignity within our correctional system.

But most importantly, it recognized up the Front Commandment.

People can rehabilitate, people cannot rehabilitate inside.

A justice system that sounds people deep as hard, but a system that lists and creates the possibility for healing, rehabilitation, and safety building.

For 20 years I live within without reports.

Today I stand before you, not only speaking for myself, but speaking with also speaking, but also asking that no human being inside correctional system ever be forced into silence again because dignity begins with someone, something very special, the right to be heard.

Thank you.

And I will now like to read with the digital time afforded to this board.

I want to also again thank Chairwoman Pitts over the committee for allowing me to provide extra time to read into the record the testimony of some of our board members, darling with Miss London Teter.

Her letter states, Chairwoman Pinto and members of the DC Committee, Calford.

My name is Dundee Tita, and I am currently at CTF.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of the East Act.

I am here because of what I went through while I was incarcerated.

I did not want anyone else to experience the same thing.

I was pregnant and gave birth while being in custody of the DC Department of Correction.

I was not the first pregnant woman at DOC.

And when I was incarcerated, I was repeatedly told that certain policies and support was already in place.

I was told there was prestigious.

I was told that there was fasting.

But when I asked basic questions about my rights about what I was entitled to, about what I would happen next, no one could give me a straight answer.

I was not the first person to ask these questions, and I won't be the last.

But still nothing was clear.

Nothing was there for.

After I gave birth, I returned to custody and was now provided with basic post-program supplies.

I had just had a baby, and I was told those supplies would be there.

They were.

When it came to breastfeeding, I was told I would be given a pooler so that I could safely transport my breast milk to my family.

That never happened either.

This instead, once they meet, I was given a trash bag that pay my mother-in-law when she came to select the milk for my child.

Those are not misunderstanding, those are failures, and they happen because there was no meaningful way to for people like me to raise concern in a great deadlood that could lead to a change.

When I work with a lawyer to try to get answers, we still face burdens.

We were told things should happen that never did.

We were promised policies that were never implemented.

That is why the East Act matters.

This bill is about dignity.

It is about allow incorporated people to participate in the civic process, not just for themselves, but for people who come after me.

We already have zone calls with lawyers.

There are computers and technology throughout the jail.

So when we are told there is no way to do this, that simply is the truth.

The question becomes if the tools exist, why are we allowed to use them to make things better?

I want to be clear.

People who are prospered or not trying to cause problems.

We do not want to testify just to testify.

We are trying to defend all.

We are trying to improve condition.

We are trying to help the system actively rehabilitate people instead of breaking them down.

The Ease Act gives us a voice.

It gives us a way to speak directly to the people who oversees this system.

I can only talk to the ANC, Mr.

Cunningham, because I'm lucky to have plastic with him.

Otherwise, there is no real way to rely for me to reliable for a spontaneous death.

I am okay telling my story because it already happened to me.

But I am here to I am here so it does not happen again.

No one should come back from giving birth without supplies.

No one should be handled in their breast milk to their family in a trash bag.

And no one should be denied the right to simply speak because they are incarcerated.

Please support the knees that thank you from London Tim.

And from James Carroll.

He speaks back on October 23rd, October 23rd, 2025.

Now almost five or six months later, all residents received a message stating that the library services will be temporarily suspended effectively and even before an ambitatory and transition.

You will be notified as this procedure is completed.

Thank you.

For your understanding in your operation, that's what was there.

Prior to this announcement, the library service was made available to all residents at CTF and CDL being mobile library costs, managed by two librarians who would visit every unit every two weeks, allowing every graduate to select two books in exchange.

This is not happening anymore.

So for five months now, no residents had the access to any books at all.

We are told this was due to the DC PL staff shortage with no expectation that it will change any time soon.

The residents relies on these books for education, for past and time, for mental health, for joy and entertainment.

Without these accessors, the residents are feeling lost, trapped in the steel with no way out to relieve the pain and suffering they have gone through.

We please ask for this Ease Act to be passed so we can get law library books or staff so we can continue to read and be productive and educate our mind and rehabilitate ourselves.

And we want to thank the Ease Act for that opportunity.

Then I would like to read the gathering forces from the remaining board members of my ASD clean.

We want to say we will now, I mean, excuse me.

I will now read from the discernment gathered from my whole board.

The residents of CTF and CTF wants to thank you, Chairwoman Pinto, and the distinguished members of the committee for providing this opportunity for their boys to be heard.

The residents also would want to extend their appreciation to Deputy Director Williams for allowing me and my capacity at the ASP Division to establish a residential adversary of committee board on March 3rd, 2026.

This board consists of five men and five women representing residents from both CTF and CDF.

The purpose of this board is to gather information directly from the resident population so that their concerns can be responsibly and respectfully communicated to the leadership and oversight body.

After gathering input from the residents across both facilities, the board identifying three basic issues that consistently affect their entire resident population.

I will briefly outline those concerns.

Part one, solitary confinement, and human deterioration.

Many residents are DC jail or currently living under conditions because we resembled solitary refinement.

With very limited human interaction and minimal access to meaningful programs.

Decades of research have shown that prolonged isolation causes mental and physical harm, including severe anxiety, depression, deluviation, memory loss, emotional instability, and long-term neurological damage.

I do not speak about this simply from research.

I speak from experience.

That is why I submitted a budget proposal to Council Member Wendell Felder requesting expanding funding to support programming opportunities for incarcerated residents because programming restores purpose.

Programming restores hope.

They allow inconsecrated individuals to remain connected to the community they will one day return to.

Unfortunately, the situation appears to have worsened just that time.

Recently, an elder woman became seriously dealed from food for it and had to be transported to an outside medical facility for treatment.

This should concern everyone.

Food is not equipped.

Mood is a basic necessity.

Yet residents regularly report meals that are nutritionally inadequate, poorly prepared.

This raised the thirds regarding public health safety and accountability.

We must ask ourselves how many more must suffer before meaningful action is taken.

How many lives must be engaged before this situation is recognized as a crisis?

This is the issue.

This issue is not simply about food.

It is about human dignity and institutional responsibility and closing the urgency of the East Act.

They represents system issues that require meaningful oversight, accountability, and reform that is by the East Act is so important and by its passage is therapy.

The East Act provides the framework necessary to strip the oversight, improved transparency, and ensure that the voices of the incarcerated residents are not ignored.

A congressional system should not only punish wrongdoing, it should also create an opportunity for rehabilitation, accountability, and human dignity.

The residences of CTF and CDF respective active tells us to advance it and pass the Ease Act so that the concerns of those living that style of rest of the facility can be heard, addressed, and improved because the system that listened is a system that improves.

Thank you for your time.

I want to thank all those who have supported the residents here that have their portion heard the justice land and everybody else.

You know you all we appreciate y'all's support, and we appreciate good over the committee and director Williams, and we prayed that some type of resolution is had and the voice of other residents have their boss return and conditions changed for the value for us all.

I want to thank you once again as the commission of ASD for this opportunity, and I look forward to working with this administration to approve for the residents here.

Thank you for your time, and I yield back respectfully.

Great.

Well, thank you very much, Commissioner Cunningham, for your testimony.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

Thank you all.

Um thank you for for reading the testimony of others who are currently in custody.

I think it again is a reminder of why it's so important to pass this bill.

So really appreciate you being here and for your representation.

Um, we're gonna turn next to Shemika Hayes, who is the former ANC commissioner uh of the DC Jail.

Ms.

Hayes, are you with us?

Yes, I'm here.

Okay, great.

Welcome.

Please go ahead.

Good morning, Chair Pinto and members of the council.

My name is Shamika Hayes.

I'm a former advisory neighborhood conditioner for 707 F8 and a returning sexy.

I'm a resident of Ward 4.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

I'm here to speak in favor of the Ease Act, which is designed to move, remove unnecessary barriers, and ensure residents can engage with their government in meaningful ways.

I know firsthand about the barriers that residents within the DC Department of Corrections face when attempting to exercise their civic duties and participate in the democratic process.

This bill will remove many of those barriers.

The spirit of that legislation recognizes that government works best when it is accessible, transparent, and inclusive of those of the voices of those most impacted by as decisions.

The District of Columbia has taken important steps to expand civic participation and access to government through policies like the Restore the Vote Act.

And I commend the DOC implementation of voting at the jail.

However, significant barriers to civic engagement remain.

Policies debated and enacted by this council directly impact conditions of confinement, family connections, access to services, and pathways to successful re-entry.

Yet many incarcerated residents, despite being directly affected by these policies, do not have meaningful opportunities to participate in council hearings or share their experiences with policymakers.

Hearing directly from residents of the jail will also address a common problem that I witnessed.

DOC sweeps things under the roof.

For example, when I was there, red droppers in my food, red dropping when there was red droppers in my food, I told the supervisor who took pictures, but nothing happened.

There was no follow-up or investigation.

And when I wrote the council about it, the DOC got made statement.

Tell us before you till the dual year.

But they already knew and didn't do anything.

Allowing DOC residents to testify virtually will strengthen counsel oversight of the Department of Corrections and ensure legislation is informed by lived experience and real-time conditions.

As someone who served the residents of War 7 as an advisory neighborhood commissioner, I deeply understand the importance of ensuring community voices are heard and policy discussions.

As a returning citizen, I also understand firsthand how policies made without direct input from impacted individuals can miss critical realities.

My own experience shows how engaging in civic processes leads to personal growth and skills building.

When people in the jail are able to vote or engage with the government, it affirms their commitment to self-improvement and their potential for successful reentry into society.

Allow incarcerated residents to speak with counsel via Zoom will humanize these neighbors, ensuring they are seen as more than their worst moment.

The Ease Act also ensures that the ANC commissioner representing the jail, a position that I once proudly held, can better communicate with the constituents.

This is critical as during my time as the ANC commissioner, I often experienced challenges communicating with constituents.

Walkthroughs will be scheduled but never happened.

Emails were sent but never delivered.

Although DLC has made good progress in supporting the ANC position, not everyone has access to the commissioner, and that needs to change.

I respectfully urge the council to quickly adopt the Ease Act with some improvements as others have outlined.

If the district truly believes in principles of access, equity, and transparency, then we must ensure that incarcerated residents who are still members of our community have the opportunity to participate in the legislative process.

In addition to my testimony, I will submit a resolution from ANC 7F that we passed last year in support of requiring DLC to allow people to participate in council hearings.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you all.

And I also want to thank the DC Justice Lab and the Second Luck Project for your partnership and work on this important bill.

I should have mentioned that at the at the outset.

So thank you all very much.

We will now turn to Jesse White, legislative and policy director of the prisoners' legal services of Massachusetts.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

Great.

Hello, Chairperson Pinto and members of the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee.

My name is Jesse White.

I'm the legislative director at Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts.

I appreciate the opportunity today to speak in strong support of the Ease Act.

In Massachusetts, I've had the opportunity and the privilege of working in close collaboration with incarcerated people, community partners, legislators, and our Department of Correction to facilitate remote participation of incarcerated people in legislative hearings.

And I can speak to you from experience regarding the immense benefits that have resulted from this.

First, legislators have expressed that testimony from incarcerated people is powerful and informative, allowing them to more effectively weigh the bills that they're considering.

In Massachusetts, we've had well over a hundred incarcerated people who've testified from seven different prisons, including from maximum security and from solitary confinement.

Their testimony has shed critical light on issues related to structural racism, conditions of confinement, extreme sentencing, family connection, and parole.

Second, incarcerated people have told us that being heard is incredibly meaningful and pro-social experience.

Our population, like that in DC is disproportionately BIPOC.

Participation in democratic process emphasizes our shared humanity, promotes greater equity, connects incarcerated people to their communities, and allows them to make a positive contribution.

Facilitating this participation is essential, especially because this population has been historically marginalized and silenced.

Finally, facilitating such testimony is easy.

In Massachusetts, prison administrators set up a computer in the prison with access to remote video technology.

The legislature designates a time during the hearing when incarcerated testimony will be taken.

During that time, the prison calls the list of incarcerated testifiers down to line up and be called to the computer to be heard one by one.

It takes very little space and only the same amount of Wi-Fi that's necessary to facilitate a regular video call, which happens all of the time.

It's that simple to ensure more equitable democratic process that includes those who've traditionally experienced barriers.

I'll close by sharing what one incarcerated person wrote to the Massachusetts governor, thanking her for facilitating his testifying experience.

Quote Listening is simple.

Listening is a simple but powerful act.

It costs nothing but time, yet it pays powerful dividends.

I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, and I truly hope you will pass this legislation.

Thank you for your time and your work on this bill.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Anthony Blankenship, Senior Community Organizer, Civil Survival.

Good morning, Chair Pintel and members of the committee.

My name is Anthony Blankenship, testifying in strong support of the Ease Act on behalf of Civil Survival, a Washington State-based organization that works on criminal justice reform and civic education for people that have experienced incarceration.

I myself am a returning citizen and former resident of DC.

In Washington, incarcerated individuals can provide virtual testimony before the legislative committees.

Our state's Department of Correction coordinates directly with the legislature and facilitates this testimony through Zoom.

The process itself is accessible, safe, and manageable.

And while our DOC limits the number of testimonies per committee, there is also unlimited written testimony available to anyone who requests it.

What we've seen as a result is civics participation at its best, from talking about the physical and mental health aspects of solitary confinement to fighting for their own voting rights.

The opportunity to testify has given people a healthy outlet to be heard and stand as the foremost experts of their own lived experience.

People who are directly impacted by the laws being debated don't just have a voice, they are humanized in the eyes of people making the decisions and also empowers them as leaders.

We have seen it make it support safer prisons because these individuals stop feeling like oppressed subjects and start feeling like community members.

The EZAC would give DC residents the same opportunity.

The people most affected by your laws deserve a voice in shaping them, and I urge the council to pass the Ease Act.

Thank you and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Stacey Littner, Director of Decarceration Advocacy, Second Look Project.

Sorry, my camera's a little messed up.

Good morning.

My name is Stacey Littner, and I am the director of Decarceration Advocacy at the Second Look Project.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today and strong support of Bill 26480, the Ease Act of 2025.

This legislation is a critical step toward ensuring that district residents, including the more than 2,000 individuals currently in the custody of DOC can meaningfully participate in the democratic process that shapes their lives and communities.

I want to pause and name something directly.

DOC residents were denied the right to testify at today's hearing.

We are debating a bill about their voices without their voices.

The practice of disenfranchising people with criminal convictions has deep roots in racial discrimination.

The district took a historic step in addressing this legacy when it passed the Restore the Vote Amendment Act in 2020, restoring voting rights to incarcerated residents.

But barriers to meaningful civic participation remain.

One of the most significant is the lack of opportunity for DOC residents to engage directly with the legislative process.

The Ease Act addresses this exclusion.

We strongly support the bill and recommend several amendments to strengthen it.

First, cost-free participation.

All communication with the council should be at no cost to remove financial barriers.

Second, ensure ANC access.

Individuals in DOC custody should have multiple methods to communicate with their ANC.

We specifically recommend adding language that guarantees access by email, telephone, letter, and by requesting a meeting.

Our understanding is that currently individuals are limited to email, and not every resident uses or has access to email.

We also recommend adding reciprocal language that ensures the ANC can reach their constituents using these same methods.

Third, confidentiality protections.

Communications between the ANC and their constituents should be treated as confidential correspondents.

This is consistent with protections afforded to communications with other elected officials.

Fourth, oversight and support.

We recommend that annual reporting include civic engagement related grievances and that residents be permitted to have attorneys or advocates present while testifying.

The district has been a national leader in expanding civic participation for incarcerated residents.

We urge the council to continue building on this record and pass the Ease Act.

Every day residents incarcerated in DOC facilities are subject to laws shaped by this body, yet they have no direct way to engage with you.

Thank you, and I welcome any questions.

Thank you.

Daniel Rosen, co-founder of the Coalition for Carceral Nutrition.

Good morning, Chair Kento.

Thank you for letting me testify today.

My name is Daniel Rosen.

I'm a Ward 1 resident and a return citizen.

I've lived in DC for over 30 years and came home in 2021 after six years of incarceration and about a year in the DC jail.

I'm here to support the Ease Act, and I want to be clear about why.

The bill is pretty simple.

As others have noted, it codifies the ability of people inside DOC facilities to testify before the council gives them better access to their ANC reps and the legislative process and requires DOC to provide materials, uh, educational materials.

That's really about it.

And the fact that none of that exists right now tells you everything you need to know about the district's view of the people it locks up.

When I was inside, there was no mechanism to participate in a hearing.

No way to tell my council member about the impact of a budget line.

No way to really even reach an ANC commissioner, even though technically you're still a constituent.

The people in that jail belong to the community but have been functionally cut off from any form of civic engagement, and not by accident, by policy or an absence of policy.

So we have to ask who's inside the jail.

Black people make up about 45% of DC's population, but 90% of the people in that jail.

And when we're talking about who is being silenced in the legislative process, we are talking about black DC residents primarily, and overwhelmingly so.

Locking people out of testimony and out of basic information about how their government works is not some neutral administrative oversight.

It lands on one community every time.

As you know, I have worked alongside other numerous other organizations in DC to improve food and nutrition in the jail.

And while it's useful for you to hear from returned citizens like me and the ANC commissioners here especially, and the commissioner, like his predecessors, has publicized has prioritized food and nutrition issue.

And we appreciate that.

A resident who went to the hospital for food poisoning should be able to tell you about that experience directly.

Or about solitary or visitation policies or all the other issues that affect people's lives.

People in that jail are not asking for anything extraordinary.

They're asking that as DC residents who will come home to DC who have families in DC and are affected by DC laws, they be allowed to speak when those laws are being made.

The pretrial detention in the jail ought to afford them the rights and protections.

The rest of DC's residents are entitled to.

Denying them those rights is another way we presume their guilt instead of their innocence.

The infrastructure for remote testimony exists.

We all used it during COVID.

Council knows how to do this, and DOC does too if it wants to.

The excuses ring hollow.

What's missing has been the political will to extend the participation to folks inside.

And it's not a good look given the glaring racial disparities that already exist in that jail.

Please also ensure that this access is free and does not eat into people's visitation minutes and the money that they are already spending inside that jail.

Let's not erect more financial barriers.

The Ease Act ought to be a floor, not a ceiling.

But right now there's nothing.

Please give people inside that way in.

Thank you.

I'll be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Mr.

Rosen.

Um, and I I just want to note, because a few folks have mentioned this about the no-cost access.

That is included in the bill as written, and I agree is an important piece of this to make sure that it doesn't cost anything.

Um, Alex Stein, public witness.

Grace Thomas.

Hey, can y'all hear me?

Yes, go ahead.

Great.

Um, hey y'all, my name is Grace Thomas.

I'm a board member for the Legal One Voters of the District of Columbia.

Uh, first off, I want to thank everyone for the opportunity to testify, uh, especially virtually here today.

Um, I'm award five um president, um, but also like I said, representing the league.

Um, the league here today wants to strongly urge council members uh to support the Ease Act.

Um the League is a volunteer-run organization that works closely with district offices, educational uh institutions, other nonpartisan organizations uh to educate voters about the importance of civic education, um, civic engagement, register voters, and facilitating valuable conversations about the fight for DC statehood.

Um, the league has long partnered with the DC DOC, uh CIC and BOE to educate and register voters in DOC custody.

Uh, we reach thousands of voters, thousands of individuals uh every year.

Um we have already started visiting the DC jail this year to educate and register voters uh before the June primary and intend to do it throughout the year for the November elections.

Um the league knows that our incarcerated neighbors offer an irreplaceable perspective as people intimately impacted by district laws and policies.

Every time we enter the jail, we ask detained residents about the issues that they care about most and the eager eagerly tell us.

Uh, just to name a few, those issues uh include affordable housing, uh shelters for unhoused resources for long-term unemployment, concerns about clean drinkable water.

Um, you guys have already also heard about the food issues, uh conditions of the DC jail and support for family members when they are detained.

Uh these are just again issues to name a few, and they were just based on a few weeks of you know visiting this year.

We learn more every single time we go into the jail.

Um, incarcerated people, I hope everyone can agree, are not apathetic to the issues that this council considers.

Uh, despite having a say at the ballot box, many incarcerated residents feel voiceless of this council in this council's decision-making process.

Uh, because they cannot see you, uh, they don't know what you're considering, and really they can't participate unless it's through other folks.

Uh, the Ease Act will change that.

As DC embarks on the construction of a new jail, this is an opportune time to pass the Ease Act.

If enacted, uh, the league, as I'm sure a lot of other organizations would be dedicated to uh collaborating with DOC and district leaders to ensure that our adjusted impacted neighbors have meaningful civic access.

Uh DC leads the nation, as y'all have heard uh from other testimonies today in jail-based voting access nationally.

Uh, we believe that this is the next frontier that we should be leading, and we urge uh council members to vote in there for the bill.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Cinquan Umar Muhammad.

Yes, Mayor, can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

All right.

All right.

Thank you, Chairwoman Pinto for holding this important hearing.

I also want to thank you and the nine co-introducers of the Ease Act for your leadership.

My name is St.

Quan Umar Mohammed.

I'm a war-day resident, a member of the Unlock the Box DC coalition working in solitary confinement at the DC jail, and a proud member of the Thrive on the 25 coalition, where we use advocacy, legislation, and public education to support young people ages 16 to 24 who are involved in the criminal legal system.

I'm here today in strong support of the Ease Act.

I want to emphasize how critical it is that the council hear directly from people with most restrictive and isolated conditions, especially those in solitary confinement and restrictive housing.

As a returning citizen myself, I know firsthand that this bill is not just important, it is necessary.

I urge the council to move it forward without delay.

Oversight only works when it is grounded in truth.

Right now, there's a gap between what is being reported to this council and what people decide the jail are actually experiencing.

I've heard claims that solitary confinement does not exist at a DC jail.

Yet, under the United Nations definition, conditions clearly meet that standard.

That disconnect is exactly why this bill matters.

While I support the bill applying to everyone, it would be even stronger if it explicitly guarantees access for individuals of solitary confinement, restrictive housing, protective custody, and middle health units.

These are the spaces where people face the greatest isolation and the highest risk of harm.

Their voices are not optional.

They are essential.

And as the bill advances, I urge you not to compromise the way the voice of those who are most vulnerable.

As someone who survived solitary confinement and leading incarceration, I know what it feels like to be cut off from the world.

The moment that helped restore my humanity were the ones where I was reminded that I still had a voice.

Voting was one of those moments.

It gave me a sense of dignity, responsibility, and connection.

It reminded me that I still had a stake in my community and the road is shaping this future.

Expanding access to civic participation, like the Ease Act proposes, creates that same sense of connection and accountability for people who are still inside.

For these reasons, I strongly support the Ease Act and respectfully urge the council that quit me to move it forward because when we deny people the ability to be heard, we don't just isolate them.

We erase them.

And this council has the power to ensure that no one in our city is ever made invisible again.

Thank you again for the opportunity to speak, Councilwoman Pinto.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate your testimony.

Yes, right.

Commissioner Cunningham, I want to ask you just a process question because one of the things that we'll hear later from DOC leadership is around the technology.

Can you walk us through how are you testifying today before us?

I'm testifying before you all today.

Um I've been afforded an office, which is given to those who become the ASC.

I got an office, so in my office, I got uh virtual uh way to be able to be here today before them.

But we also have, like Miss Maggie Tita was saying, down school building.

We have jumbled on TV that we can provide access for meetings like this.

And I was trying to get that done.

It would have been able to provide at least 20 or more uh residents to be able to be seen just like I'm being able to be seen.

We also got opportunities down in the visiting room here at CTF, as well as the leisure um area um computer access.

Um, all through the building, it's computer access that would have been able to allow residents to be seen like I'm being seen and their voices being heard, like my voice is being heard.

Um, over the jail, I don't I don't know how much their access is, but they do have multiple visited areas because when we most residents over here actually go over to the jail for attorney clients uh uh or judicial type of proceedings over virtual contact like this.

So it's meaningful opportunity for those over the jail to would have been able to participate um if they were allowed to.

And uh I think that's something that shouldn't be, but we we definitely need to be able to um change what is going on here today.

Thank you.

And commissioner, all residents have access to a tablet.

Is that right?

Yes, and that's enough.

No, not everyone has access to a tablet, but we got different tablets.

We got the GTL tablet, but they can provide the educational tablets.

No one over the jail, as far as I know.

Well, I was just over there has access to the expectational tablet that set one unit, and I think that's the educational building.

Um, but no one else.

And that's one of the main complaints.

I know Deputy Director Williams and the four weeks that they try to provide residents today.

So you have to do that in the associational program.

Um forced the nigga because the educational tablet for now need to rehabilitate rehabilitation's moving program that we have in order for residents to get certificates to be able to submit to know that they have this don't be uh and that really from the reprocess, right?

Of show that they try to be stopped in.

Okay, thank you very much for that.

And Ms.

Hayes, it looked like you wanted to add something around the tablets and the access.

I'm trying to make clear for the record how people would physically be testifying through their tablet devices and and where um all residents don't have the access, and even on the GTO um tablets.

When I was there, the the um there were places that they go to send us communication, but I wasn't getting the communication, my proxy didn't have access to it, it did not work on the so it only really worked well on the educational tablet, which since um COVID is over, all the residents don't have, and even with the GTO tablets is always a wait.

Everybody does not have access to the tablet.

So um it's a lot of disparities from what DOC is saying is going on over there and what's actually going on.

Okay, thank you.

And so if this bill passes, how do you envision everybody signing up to testify um and using a tablet in order to present their testimony?

Um, they don't have to use a tablet, they have the smart um screens over there.

And when they did, I think it was uh legislation around the special process or something like that.

They did they use those screens.

So I know for fact it could be done because I was working in education and I was there when the guys came down from different units and did it, and they did it on I think two or three different jumbo trons, and they were able to do what they need to do.

So why can we do it in certain situations but not all?

Yeah, okay, I appreciate that context.

That's really helpful.

Um then Jesse White, are you still on?

When you saw the once implementation happened in Massachusetts, were there any other opportunities of expansion or um hurdles that you became aware once you went to implement a similar bill that we should be aware of in DC?

Yeah, and I mean to be clear, we don't have legislation in Massachusetts.

Um it's done uh just as a matter of collaboration.

Uh but it started um you know slowly and then expanded.

So one committee allowed for incarcerated folks to speak and heard uh you know, a panel of incarcerated testifiers, and then another committee heard you know, 30 incarcerated testifiers on a bill, and then the following session we had three committees hearing a total of 90 incarcerated testifiers, and then last session or this session, we had I think um four committees that ended up hearing over a hundred incarcerated testifiers.

So it's just slowly expanded over time.

I think because it's become clear that it is so doable.

You know, I think there were a lot of hesitations at first.

There were a lot of objections from our Department of Correction that it wasn't feasible, that it wasn't safe, that they wouldn't have the space, that they wouldn't have the capacity, you know, a lot of the things that I'm hearing um are being asserted as barriers here.

Um and still now, you know, there's there's been things that have been raised about oh, the testimony is gonna go through our count time, and so we can only have a certain number of testifiers because it has to happen before or after count.

And we've been able to make sure that the time designated for testifiers all happens before the count, you know, by working with the legislature to make sure that the designated time for incarcerated folks to speak happens, you know, in alignment with what the DOC's operational needs are.

Um so you know, every barrier that's come up, we've been able to sort of solve for, and it hasn't taken a whole lot of effort to figure out the solution.

And a lot of that has come from incarcerated people themselves, weighing in on oh, what's the barrier that's being raised?

Here's the solution to that problem because they know operations at the prisons as well, and they know exactly what's available in the way of technology or timing or participation that would be useful.

But I think if there's one message I can tell the committee and any department officials that might be listening to this, is that it's much, much easier than you think it's gonna be.

Um, and it pays off in enormous ways because as other folks have said, the folks who are incarcerated really have the expertise on so many of these bills in so many ways that um that others just don't, you know, have the day-to-day, up-to-date most uh most experienced knowing, you know, uh what's what's necessary for correct um and robust public policy that's gonna impact their lives, meaningfully.

So hopefully that answers the question.

Yes, absolutely.

No, that's very helpful.

And I I think this count issue you raise is an important one.

And there are other contexts where we accommodate different populations.

We do this with students and young people all the time.

If there are bills, especially that are particularly impacting students, um, and we know that the students are trying to testify, well, you know, portion part of the day so that kids can come after school.

And so it's it wouldn't be the first time that we can work collaboratively with the legislature and ensuring that um we're recognizing the reality that people are in custody and and we need to hear from them uh if they want to be heard.

So thank you very much.

Um, I want to turn to my colleagues who have joined us.

We've been joined by my ward four colleague, Councilmember Denise Lewis George, and my Ward 7 colleague, Councilmember Wendell Felder.

Um, I'll turn to you first, Councilmember Lewis George, for any opening statement you may have.

And if you have any questions for uh these witnesses.

Thank you.

I just want to uh thank you, Chairperson Pinto.

Um, and I wanted to briefly uh come by and express my support for a few of the bills that I was proud to co-intro uh duce uh that are before us today, and grateful that we are having this hearing and able to hear from so many of our public um about their support for many of these bills and their suggestions for how to improve them.

Um, starting with the Ease Act, uh, which in my opinion should be easy to do uh and easy to pass and easy to implement.

Uh so I hope that's the testimony we will get from the government today, uh, which ensures that residents in DOC custody can testify before the council and engage with their ANC commissioner.

To me, this bill is about something fundamental.

Uh, people do not lose their voice in our democracy because they are incarcerated.

So many of the decisions we make here directly impact their lives, their families, whether it's their parents, their children, their spouses.

It impacts their communities.

Uh, and they also have the ability to give valuable feedback.

In fact, listening to them is probably a part, can be a most meaningful thing we can do to find actual solutions to the problems we face.

If we believe in second chances, in dignity and in real community connection, then we also have to make civic participation truly accessible, not something that just exists only on paper.

So I want to thank uh Commissioner Cunningham, who has already testified.

I want to thank everyone here and advocates who have continued to fight for this.

Um, and I look forward to our council moving this forward.

I want to turn to the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act.

This bill moves the district toward directing more child support payments and arrears to families rather than the government.

And it represents a long overdue shift to a family first model.

For too long, our system has prioritized paying itself back instead of making sure children and families get the support that was meant for them in the first place.

At the end of the day, when a parent makes a payment, that money should go to their child, not sit with government.

And we know that when families actually receive those resources, it makes a real difference in stability and in opportunity and in outcomes for kids.

This is a big step towards a system that is fairer and actually works for families.

And I look forward to us working and pushing this through as well.

Finally, uh and last but not least, the emergency medical services clarification amendment act.

This bill clarifies medical oversight within the 911 call center and strengthens training, certification, and quality assurance requirements.

And it's about count accountability and getting the basics right.

Uh, OUC handles hundreds of dispatches a day.

Uh, the vast majority of them are medical.

And for far too long, whether clinical guidance from the medical director is followed can really depend on circumstances rather than a clear and consistent standard.

That's a problem when people's lives are on the line.

Uh in Ward 4, we've heard too many concerns from residents about delays and confusion in emergency response.

When someone calls 911 in medical, especially in medical emergencies, there should be no question about the quality, the consistency, and the urgency of the response they receive.

And this bill helps us move in that direction and really can help us save lives.

Across all of these bills, Councilman Pensive, I think there is a through line, which is clear.

Government should be responsive, fair, and centered on people's lived experiences.

And so I want to thank you for holding this hearing again.

Thank you to all the public witnesses for being here and sharing your experiences.

And then I have one question for Commissioner Cunningham if you're still there.

Yes, I am.

I wanted to ask you upon the passage of this legislation.

I'm speaking into existence already.

Um how easy do you feel we can uh and quickly we can um get this implemented?

Uh and what is your experience, what your experience, what is your experience tell us about how we can do this more efficiently and effectively.

Well, my experience uh we can probably get it done and pass is working directly, but uh deputy director Williams.

Um I speak highly of her because she's program orientated.

Um she does come to the units and uh speak to the residents um and far as my experience dealing with her, she seems sincere and trying to make things better.

Like I spoke in my first hearing, it just don't trickle down.

And um, she can't do it alone.

But um, with the uh back and other residents here, myself fighting tirelessly to try to get things done in the outside help that we have as well.

And we think that the people like Pento and yourself, um, we we definitely encourage moving forward, but I really do believe that we can get it done.

I don't see why that, I just don't see why I have it been done, but uh with the help of this bill and the people speaking and have outside support of this bill, I think we should get it done.

Absolutely thank you.

Thank you so much for your advocacy and continued work.

Um, thank you, Councilmember Pinto.

Great.

Thank you so much, Councilman Lewis George, and thanks for being here.

And I I love your point about the through line of all these bills being grounded in people's experience because um all of these bills I wrote and introduced after testimony that we heard from the public about their experience.

Um, and so it is so important um to be part of the legislative process so we can hear from people and and make sure we're shaping bills around those experiences.

So thank you.

Um I'm gonna turn now to Councilmember Felder for any opening statement or questions you may have.

Uh well, first and foremost, thank you, Chairwoman Pento uh for your leadership.

I'm proud to serve as a member of this committee alongside with you.

Uh thank you for putting these bills forward.

I'm uh uniquely excited about the ensuring access and supporting engagement amendment act of 2025.

Uh DC Jail is in Ward 7.

Uh, and what I know from firsthand is oftentimes uh for whatever the case may be, if an individual uh becomes incarcerated, they're normally treated as uh two three-fifths of a man, and sometimes their rights aren't always uh fully given.

Uh I've had an opportunity on a number of occasions to visit DC Jail.

Uh, I do want to commend Commissioner Cunningham and his predecessor, uh Commissioner Um Shemika, I'm sorry, Timika, for the work that they're doing to really uh highlight some of the conditions within the facility uh as well as their continued advocacy for some of their cellmates.

So it's always good to see you, Commissioner Cunningham.

And uh I look forward to the next visit.

Uh, with that, just a couple questions uh for you.

Could you speak to if this bill is passed?

How do you think it will impact you as a commissioner and help further making sure that uh city leaders have a full grasp of what's happening within DCJ?

Not only me of a voice, but the residents of voice, I think it encourages them that um humanize them and it um it reflects the people care.

So when you have someone like this being passed, and the residents see, especially those who try the program, they give them their sentence, I believe, to be able to go up with society and be a productive citizen.

And council members like yourself as well when they'll feel for coming down here and people seeing your face and humanizes us.

It makes us feel encouraged and want to be out to go out there and help participate in this mock we see how we can make a change.

So I think by passing this academic people here and the outside knowing that we have adherence actually shows a lot.

Um that someone cares.

And we thank you, Peter.

We thank you, Miss Denise, for this opportunity.

We thank you all that we encourage your Lord to come down because that means that when they'll fail to come, now people speaks about that.

Um I'm just gonna bring this up because this is some, like you said, the majority of people that was in here is after the murder.

But when the January 6 was in this institution, they had their representations coming down here all the so much, and a lot of things was getting done, and it made us feel like who cares about us, right?

The minority, the majority black.

But now they're probably trying to get some attention to this act, it emboldened us to want to better our lives, educate ourselves and rehabilitate ourselves.

And every time that I speak admit to the young youth fear, as well as letting them know that we have a voice because we allow the vote.

It means something.

But to have something like this pass is I think it takes it to a whole other level to know that their voice can be heard because like I spoke earlier.

My voice was silence for 20 years of solitary confinement, and it leads to a depression as that and other traumatic um issues, and in many cases, people resort with suicide dose, and some of them carry it out.

And I witnessed in my time and being a solitary five, but over nine people committed suicide.

People who can read, write, it was brilliant, but you never know what's going on in a person's head when he can find in themselves.

So passing this ease act not only humanizes us, but it also saves lives.

And um that that's that's something I think people need to understand.

We are safe and lives when we pass this act, and we just act, we just act on the and that's all we have with the resident, that this ease act be passed.

And um I want to thank y'all all again for giving us this opportunity to have our voices heard through me, but I would like for their voices to be heard through us all at this institution.

Oh, thank you for that.

I'll wrap up um with my questions with this comment.

Uh, Commissioner Cunningham, you have a very important responsibility as a commissioner uh between uh residents who live within the jail and DC government.

Uh you should not take that lightly.

I look forward to continuing to work with you, and as always, my office is available.

Uh, and I look forward to seeing you at my next visit uh to the facility.

And with that, madam chairperson, the floor is by yours.

Well, thank you, Councilman Felder, and thank you for being here today.

Um right.

I am going to turn to our next panel of virtual witnesses, and then we'll turn to our in-person folks.

Um, thank you again, Commissioner Cunningham and everybody for being here today.

And hopefully, next time uh you come, you won't have to read read the testimony of other folks in custody, and they'll be able to give them them themselves.

So really appreciate it.

That's our host.

All right.

Um, we're gonna call our next panel who is here to testify for the child support bill.

Mary Dell Bull Vu, Tiana Gibbs, Michaela Deming, Diana Azevedo McCaffrey, Andrea Thomas, Ikra Mahmood, Ashley Carter, and Maria Haggins.

We'll begin with Mary Dell Bull Vu.

Am I pronouncing your name correctly?

Meridel Bullyville.

Yes, thank you so much.

Thank you from Legal Aid DC.

Please go ahead.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

My name is Maridell Bullyville.

I've been representing parents in child support cases for the last 15 years, and I'm now the managing attorney of Legal Aid DC's family and domestic violence practice.

We urge the council to enact a full pass through child support to families currently or formerly receiving receiving TNF.

You will also hear from several of my colleagues who will discuss other provisions of the bill as well as additional reforms the council could consider.

I want to start by thanking Attorney General Schwab for his partnership over the last two years and his leadership in proposing these reforms.

Right now, our child support system does not live up to its name.

Every year, millions of dollars, the parents paying child support never reach their children.

Instead, that money is collected and largely kept by the government.

It does not fund or expand benefits programs.

Instead, child support funds government debt collection.

This system has been draining resources from DC's black communities and keeping families in poverty for decades.

We are grateful to the AG and this council for making the first update to DC's system in 20 years when our limited pass-through was increased to $200.

But we need to ensure that every dollar a parent pays goes to their child.

Here's how our system looks now.

Let's say a father pays $500 in child support.

Because the family is receiving TANF, only $200 is passed through to them.

The rest is split 50-50 between CSSD and the federal treasury.

If that same dad missed a payment and tries to catch up, the child gets nothing from that extra payment.

The children deprived of the support paid in their name are the poorest in our city, living at 35% of the federal poverty level or less.

Every extra dollar makes a real difference, paying for desperately needed shoes or a utility bill or meals so they don't go to school hungry.

The benefits from this reform cannot be overstated.

When families can't make ends meet, children pay the price in neglect, in delinquency, independence that follows them into adulthood.

Getting these dollars to families changes trajectories, improving child health outcomes, educational attainment, and long-term earnings.

It is an investment in the futures of our city's most vulnerable children.

Federal law allows and in fact incentivizes states and the district to pass through every dollar of support to families at the rate of 50 cents on the dollar for much of the money passed through.

And when parents see their payments actually help their children, they pay more consistently and stay engaged.

With DCS modernization underway, now is the time to enact the full pass-through to ensure the new system is built with the functionality to implement this reform as soon as it goes live.

We also urge the council to consider a simultaneous shift to family first distribution, making family debt the priority and simplifying both the programming and administration of the new system.

We applaud Attorney General Schwab for his leadership in putting children first, and Chairperson Pinto for advancing this critical reform.

We look forward to working with you both to build on it.

DC can lead the nation with a child support system that truly supports children, strengthens families, and advances racial equity.

I would be delighted to answer your questions.

Thank you very much.

Tiana Gibbs, Professor of Law and Director of the Gender Justice Clinic at American University Washington College of Law.

Good afternoon, Chairperson Pinto and members of the committee.

My name is Tiana Gibbs.

I direct the Gender Justice Clinic at American University Law School.

The Gender Justice Clinic strongly supports passage of the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026, along with the additions proposed by Legal Aid DC and 16 other anti-poverty organizations.

These changes advance gender justice, racial justice, and economic justice.

Our current child support system is rooted in the history of cash assistance programs that are marked by racial exclusion and racialized stereotypes about poverty.

In the 1930s, cash assistance programs imposed morals restrictions that limited eligibility to people considered to be the deserving poor, and the programs excluded unmarried mothers.

States used these policies to disqualify black mothers.

During the 1960s, many racially motivated restrictions were eliminated, and the percentage of black mothers receiving cash assistance increased significantly.

In 1975, the federal government turned to child support enforcement to recoup cash assistance costs.

As a condition of receiving cash assistance, mothers were required to cooperate with the government to secure child support and sign over their rights to child support to the government.

The policy rationale was that if the child's father provided sufficient financial support, the mother and child would not need public assistance.

The reasoning reflected prevailing gender norms about parenting.

The system failed to acknowledge that many of the fathers also had low incomes due to structural barriers to education and employment.

From these roots, the child support system became a tangled with a punitive enforcement practices and that recruitment of cash assistance for the government's benefit.

The proposed changes to the district child support system present an opportunity to move away from a policy structure rooted in racial, gender, and economic inequity.

The changes eliminate harmful child support practices that disproportionately impact Black and Latinx parents and children who are living in poverty.

When fully implemented, the bill would ensure that all child support dollars go to families instead of funding government operations.

Parents would have clarity about when child support debt can no longer be collected.

If legal aids proposals are added to the bill, all families will be first in line to receive child support collected through federal income tax refunds.

Parents receiving cash assistance would not be forced to seek child support when it could harm their family.

Returning citizens would no longer be weighed down by crushing child support debt that accumulated during incarceration.

Low-income parents who are having difficulty paying child support wouldn't have their driver's licenses suspended and be unable to get to work.

These policy changes are long overdue.

The Ginger Justice Clinic urges the council to pass this bill with the proposed additions.

Thank you for your consideration.

I welcome any questions.

Thank you.

Michaela Deming, Policy Director of DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Thank you, Chairperson Pinto, members of the committee and staff for the opportunity to testify.

My name is Michaela Deming.

I'm the policy director of the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which is the federally recognized statewide coalition of domestic violence service providers here in the district.

DC's dedicated service providers serve upwards of 1,000 victims of domestic violence on any given day across all eight wards.

We appreciate the council's goal of modernizing the district's child support system to benefit families and children and strengthen the social safety net.

These proposed reforms are essential steps towards a system that reduces poverty for district families instead of deepening it.

To strengthen the bill and ensure it meets the needs of all domestic violence survivors, we request the council include additional reforms in this bill to expand good cause exceptions.

These are also in the legal aids proposal.

After a survivor is separated from their abuser, abusive partners may escalate their tactics to regain control.

Up to 90% of women report continued harassment and abuse after separation.

Seeking child support can be a trigger for escalation and lead to dangerous and potentially lethal situation for these families.

Though TANF requires recipients to cooperate with the child support office, both federal and DC code recognize there are safety risks.

Domestic violence survivors can obtain a good cause exemption in that requirement.

And the child support office is supposed to assist survivors in employing heightened safety measures.

However, they do not uniformly or consistently inform survivors of these good cause exceptions or other available safety options.

And that when they do, they require too high a burden.

That leaves a difficult choice between survivors needing the assistance and safeguarding themselves and their families.

To improve the child support system, we ask for a few things.

Require the staff to inform domestic violence survivors of the good cause exception and other safety options.

Expand good cause to include harm to co-parenting relationships and risk to the parents' immigration status.

Reform simply the process to simplify the process of requiring the good cause waiver and including a time frame to process that request, and require the agency to support applicants applying for waivers and liberally grant good cause waivers without the need for additional proof.

67% of survivors report they have stayed longer in or returned to an abusive relationship because of these financial concerns.

By equipping district residents with the options they are already legally entitled to and removing those barriers will have survivors here with more financial autonomy to stay safe.

In my written testimony that I will submit, noting that as many as 94% of women who are incarcerated have a history of surviving physical and or sexual abuse, and that intimate partner violence continues throughout their period of incarceration.

We would note that the ability for the council to make it easier for folks to testify while they are incarcerated, we support.

Thank you very much.

But look forward to reading the full testimony for those ideas.

Appreciate that.

Thank you.

Diana Azevedo McCaffrey, public witness.

Hi.

Thank you for the invitation to testify today in support of the Child Support Amendment Improvement Act of 2026.

I'm Diana Azevedo McCaffrey, my senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research and policy institute in DC, and I lead our child support and work to improve the program for families with low incomes.

By enacting this act, DC would make its child support program more family-centered by reforming a set of policies to meet the needs of some of the lowest income families in the district.

Using a phased-in approach, the act would enact the gold standard of passing through and disregarding all child support to families in 2024.

Illinois became the first state to do this.

It's financially advantageous for the district to enact a full pass-through and any other family distribution options now because the policy changes can be reprogrammed during the district's upcoming computer systems enhancement project.

So waiting to reprogram the pro the computers later would add additional capital costs and would further delay implementing changes that help families afford basic needs that their children need now, like safe housing, diapers, and healthy food.

Although upfront investment is needed, states that move in this direction can save as much as 60 6 to 8% of program expenditures due to simplified administration, reduced systems maintenance costs, and greater cooperation by parents, which reduces the cost of collecting support.

There's considerable research that substantiates passing through all support, and there's much more information in my written testimony on these different arguments and their studies.

Studies show that child support is a valuable income source, particularly for families in poverty, making up 41 to 65% of their income when received.

And that non-custodial parents are more likely to pay support when their payments are passed through to their children.

I also support the set of provisions not yet added in the act, including expanding exemptions from the child support cooperation requirement in TANF for families who decide participating in the child support program is not in their best interest.

From already having co-parenting arrangements to experiences of domestic violence, families may have a variety of unique circumstances that inform their decision, and parents should be trusted to make this decision that's best for their children.

Child support services are critical for families who seek them, but at the same time, some child support policies harm families who turn to TANF during times of need.

This is an opportune time for DC to take action on these important changes for families.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you.

Andrea Thomas, President and CEO, United Planning Organization.

Okay.

Good afternoon.

My name is Icar Mahmoud, and I'm a senior staff attorney with Breadford the City's Legal Clinic.

I work in our parentage and child support practice, where we also co-operate the Child Support Resource Center at DC Superior Court.

And through this work, I assist both custodial and non-custodial parents every day as they navigate their child the child support system.

I'm here today to express Bread for the City's strong support of the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026.

And I'm going to briefly highlight the two provisions that are particularly particularly important to the families that we serve.

So first, the TANIF child support passed through so that the families receive the full amount of child support paid on behalf of their child.

Currently in the district, when a family receives TANIF and the non-custodial parent pays child support, the family receives only up to 200 of that payment.

While any amount above 200 is retained by the government.

So this means that if a parent pays $500 in child support, the child household can only receive 200 and the remaining $300 will go to the government rather than directly helping the child.

So this structure can actually discourage families from applying for TANF and can reduce incentives for non-custodial parents to make full payments when they know that the payments are not going directly to benefit their child.

Second, we support modifying the statute of limitations for child support enforcement.

Under the current law, each month the child support obligation becomes its own judgment and expires after 12 years unless extended.

However, enforcement often continues unless the non-custodial parent raises the statute of limitations themselves.

And usually non-custodial parents aren't aware of this.

For example, one of our clients was an elderly man who was blind and living in a special needs residential home.

Money was being taken out of his SSDI benefits for child support debt for a decades-old child support case.

The child, who is now an adult was 35 years old, and the mother was deceased.

Fortunately, we were able to file a motion to stop the garnishment and vacate the arrears.

However, he wasn't able to get the money back that was taken from his benefits.

In another case, we had a client whose driver's license was suspended because of a child support debt going back to the early 1990s, which prevented him from obtaining employment after incarceration.

We located his file, we're able to file a motion to vacate the arrears that were subject to vacature.

But fortunately, we were able to get his driver's license suspension lifted, but again, he wasn't able to get back any of the money that was taken from him.

So this bill would allow the entire entire child for order to remain enforceable until the youngest child turns 25, giving custodial parents a meaningful opportunity to collect support while their children are children, but still preventing extremely old cases from continuing indefinitely.

And so therefore Bread for their city supports this legislation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Ashley Carter, public witness.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony today.

My name is Ashley Carter, and I'm a visiting associate professor of clinical law and director of the criminal appeals and post-conviction services clinic at the George Washington University Law School.

I also practiced for a number of years as a family law attorney in the district, and my research focuses on the intersections between the criminal justice system and the family law system.

I'm here today to provide testimony in strong support of the changes proposed to improve the district's child support laws.

But importantly, I'm here to support an proposed change to this bill that I think would greatly improve it to automatically suspend child support payments when a parent is detained or incarcerated.

For the record, I fully support all of the changes proposed in this bill and my written testimony goes into further detail.

But I'd like to spend my time today discussing the ways that DC's child support laws perpetuate economic instability when a parent is interacting with the criminal justice system.

Under current DC law, when a parent has been ordered to pay child support or is detained or incarcerated, they must file a motion in court to request modification or suspension of the order.

Otherwise, child support debt continues to accrue.

And pursuant to DC code section 23-112A, when a judge sentences someone to more than 30 days of incarceration, that judge is required to inquire whether the person is subject to a child support order, give them notice that they may request a suspension or modification of the order, and actually provide them with paperwork in open court to petition for that modification or suspension.

But in practice, this rarely, if ever, occurs.

My students and I currently represent four individuals who were sentenced to more than 30 days of incarceration between 2025 and 2026.

Each was sentenced by a different superior court judge, and not a single one of those individuals was asked if they were subject to a child support order or informed that they could request a suspension, even in cases where the judge knew that the person had children.

Furthermore, the warning and the provision of the paperwork is only provided at the sentencing phase.

So if someone has been detained at the jail pretrial, they may not receive any information about their ability to modify or suspend payments, and they could accrue significant debt while they are awaiting a trial.

The requirement to file a motion to modify or suspend these payments imposes an enormous burden.

Most detained or incarcerated individuals have no way to file paperwork in family court from a jail or a prison.

They cannot often hire an attorney to file for them.

And if the support order is not modified or suspended, the consequences can be long-lasting.

As we know, unpaid child support arrearage can follow a parent for years.

This bill presents an important opportunity to keep detained and incarcerated parents from building up debt that they simply cannot pay.

So I strongly encourage the committee to adopt a change to this bill to automatically suspend child support payments any time an individual is detained.

Thank you, and I welcome any questions.

Thank you.

Maria Haggins, Legal Aid DC.

Okay.

Well, thank you all for your testimony.

I I want to ask you, Miss Boulevou from Legal Aid, um, are there any administrative concerns that we should be aware of for the pass-through that are should be accommodated for in the language of the legislation or just for our awareness as we focus on implementation.

I I would have to defer to the Office of the Attorney General for the administrative concerns.

We have heard from national advocates, and I know Miss McCaffrey's on the call and can maybe speak to it, that adopting DRA, the deficit reduction act order of distribution could help cut down on administrative concerns and both simplify the process and the longer term administration so that rather than having a whole series of exceptions when money comes in through other sources and then is passed through to the family, it would more it would streamline that process and essentially direct the money to the families at the outset, is my understanding.

But I'm not an expert in the administration of child sports, so I would really have to defer to either Diana or the Office of the Attorney General who I hope could speak to their 4D partners in other states to learn more about what they've done and the impact it had on their administrative costs.

Okay, thank you very much.

And Miss Deming, you talked about some of the barriers that survivors may have in coming to testify.

Can you say a little bit more about that?

Is that from a safety concern or more of a an access concern?

What did you mean there?

Yeah, thank you for the question.

Um it is uh both, right?

So there are some safety concerns around accessibility for um name recognition and um uh the the public record.

We have um and appreciate your office having made some accommodations in the past, um, but even some of the members of our own survivory advisory board who uh testified as um anonymous folks had their um personal um information um uh was discoverable to to folks um and um the other piece is really around the broader accessibility of the hearings.

Um each one of us is here today.

Um we didn't know until late yesterday where we would be in the order of the hearing, um, and that is incredibly difficult for folks who are working during the day, um don't know when they're going to be called.

Um so while uh virtual uh hearings have made it much more accessible, we still hear from members of our survivor advisory board and um across the the survivors that we speak to that it's incredibly difficult to take a day off of work, um make all of the arrangements necessary with all of the um unknowns with how the the hearings are currently scheduled.

Um, and so we have some recommendations around ways that the council could improve the hearing process and uh how folks register, for example, um, that would make it uh that much easier for folks to to come and participate in the process.

Okay, thank you for raising that.

And as you know, a couple of years ago, the council moved to uh streamlined systems so that every committee would have some more consistency.

Um, but that can create its own challenges when we want to be nimble in the different hurdles that different people have.

Um, and we we certainly see that with our judiciary committee issues.

So appreciate you flagging that.

Um Ms.

Carter, I wanted to ask you about the the waiver issue that you talked about.

So, under current law, is it possible for anybody to file a waiver to have their child support payments be suspended during the time that they're incarcerated?

So I think that the answer is yes, it is a matter of the knowledge of the ability to do so.

So, under current law, the sentencing judge is the one who is required to tell the defendant that they have the right to file to suspend their child support payments and to actually provide them with the paperwork in open court so that they can do that immediately upon sentencing, knowing that there are barriers to access to the court if you were not physically in the court building and you were incarcerated.

Um, but as I mentioned, that does not happen.

Um it's very, very rare that I see a sentencing judge actually give the appropriate warnings and provide that paperwork in practice, if it is raised, it is generally raised by defense counsel who may or may not be aware of that process.

So it is technically available to anyone who is sentenced to more than 30 days of incarceration.

Um I think that for lesser periods of incarceration, certainly on a case-by-case basis, a judge may determine that it is necessary to suspend payments and certainly for many reasons people file to modify child support payments based on a material change in circumstance.

Um, so someone could argue that even pretrial incarceration was a material change in circumstance, but it really relies on someone informing them that they can do that and having the ability to file the paperwork from the jail, it's just not often possible for someone to file something in family court.

They may not even know their case number, what judge they're assigned to because they don't have access to their belongings, to their apartments or homes.

So there are a number of barriers that would keep someone from being able to file that motion.

And so the burden should really not be on the individual who's incarcerated.

This should be automatic.

Okay, I appreciate that.

And do you know if if somebody has their if someone's child support obligations are suspended, is there another vehicle or avenue to make sure that the child has what they need during the period of incarceration?

Is there another fund that exists or should exist?

Should exist, I certainly think we could argue for.

I think we could spend a lot of time discussing, but in theory, it would be the public welfare system that is providing for that child at that time.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

And thank thank you all for your testimony and the work that you do.

I really appreciate you all being here.

Um and very helpful feedback so we can make sure that this bill is as strong and effective as possible.

Appreciate it.

Um I'm going to now turn to our in-person witnesses who've joined us today.

We're going to be going kind of one bill at a time.

So we're going to hear first from our witnesses in-person public witnesses for ease.

I'll call Tara Martin.

And if I can ask that everybody sit in the order that I called you, so the first person will sit to my right and your left.

Um Crystal Jones Nieves.

Yes.

Sure.

What is your name?

James Hutchinson.

James Hutchinson.

Okay, that's that's usually not allowable here.

We're gonna make an exception, but um, usually whoever uh signs up to testify.

But understood.

Okay, Crystal Jones Nevez, uh Juan Gala.

Juan Gala, Joshua Miller, Giancarlo Cambrella and Santiago, Shemika Hayes, we heard from DeAndre Davis.

Okay, we will begin with James Hutchinson, public witness.

Uh Mr.

Hudson, if you could turn your microphone on.

There we go.

I'm on.

Yes, my name is James Hutchings.

I am a returner citizen of now 314 days.

I was released May 8th, 2025 from federal prison.

Yes, I came back to DC as a homeless by choice.

Um now I am a business owner of IOM transportation ill C and also I am the campaign manager for the DC mayor or candidate, Dr.

Ronda Hamilton, which is the only candidate that had actually gave me a return of citizen, a chance of trust, leadership.

And you if you do know that's the campaign's biggest actual Sir, I need to cut you off there.

We cannot talk about campaigning in this building.

Okay.

Well, I'm also the advocate of incarcerated lives matter, which I started in 2012 while I was incarcerated, and that's my movement.

Um, and this ease act is very, very touching and passionate for me.

Um, being a return of citizen myself, and while we're in there, we look forward to being able to be involved in voting, you know, because we do have kids out here.

I'm a father of eight kids.

And you know, we do know that the laws and the people that's in leadership is gonna be affecting our kids once they get older.

So we do have amount of time, 20 years, 10 years.

We may not be present out here in the community.

However, our kids will be present.

So by us having the voice of a vote is very, very, very, I believe is a no-brainer for us to be able to keep and continue to do that because it takes the less stress off of us.

It takes the less mental awareness off of us as well, because I've seen a lot of guys that's in there now currently that speaks to me daily that speaks on why our voice is not being heard in a time where voices matter.

Um, because we have all this social media outlets and the things that goes on, which a lot of these guys have access through their families to be able to be a word and what they feel and what they feel needs to be changed so they can understand that their vote will matter for the next leadership of change, you know.

So I'm definitely here and I'm speaking on the behalf of Dr.

I mean of Miss Martin that let me speak in her position of this because you know, three years from today, she lost her son due to violence from park police.

Um so she's not in the you know condition right now, and I stepped in for her as her brother and her friend to um speak on what I'm passionate about, and that's what is incarceration.

And um, I'm a I'm an advocate for it.

I've been an advocate for since 2012 of my incarceration personally, and yes, the Ease Act is a no-brainer, Miss Um Pinto.

I believe that we need to have that unanimously unanimously, if I would say confirm to be able to allow us to keep and continue to vote from behind those walls, because that takes a lot of stress off us, our family, and it grows a future for our kids.

Thank you for allowing me to speak.

Thank you for being here.

Um and congratulations on all you are working on and welcome home.

Thank you, ma'am.

Crystal Jones Nevis, Open Horizon Fellow, Council for Court Excellence.

Good morning, Chairperson Pinto.

My name is Crystal Jones Nieves, and I am a fellow at the Council for Court Excellence.

My testimony today includes recommendations to strengthen the quality of civic engagement and provide jail residents with free tools to support testifying at council under the Ease Act.

To date, only the jails A and C can testify virtually at council hearings.

Other residents cannot watch hearings and are only allowed to submit written testimony to council.

Since the ANC cannot represent the perspectives of all residents or issues faced by just different per populations, as he stated today, we support the Ease Act in broadening access to all jail residents.

CCE further recommends that the Ease Act be amended to require DOC to enable the ANC to testify in person, just like everyone else in this room is doing today.

Um it is well researched that in-person interactions are more impactful than virtual interactions, and it's essential that the ANC is afforded the opportunity to advocate on behalf of their constituents in person.

Apart from just having the ability to present testimony, DC Joe residents must also have the resources to adequately testify.

We were glad to see that the Ease Act mandates DOC to provide educational materials to all DC Joe residents regarding their ANC legislative process and providing testimony.

As an organization with a long history of educating materials of sorry, as an organization with a long history of educating the public on legal system issues, CCE would be happy to help draft these educational materials or assist in their review.

To further support residents looking to testify, we also recommend that attorneys and non-attorney advocates be allowed to be physically present when a resident is testifying.

When it is for the purpose of civic engagement, with current fees in place, the cost of engaging in civic activity would be privately prohibitively expensive for many.

In addition, we recommend the language that be added to the bill to ensure residents have access to the ANC via email, telephone, letter, or by requesting a meeting, where meetings and phone calls would be treated with the confidentiality uh needed to allow for a canon conversation.

We also recommend this bill be changed to require DOC to establish a deadline to respond to an ANC's request to meet with residents and for DOC to provide a written explanation for any delay.

And to ensure that the ANC can visit all units in jail during inspections, including segregated housing, safe sales, and mental health units.

Moreover, will the Ease Act creates a procedure for ANCs to walk through the jail and be quarreled constituents?

We recommend the ANC be equipped with a device that can record audio and video to help document issues.

Finally, to improve the public's ability to evaluate this act, recommend DOC submit annual reports to the mayor and the council on number of residents that sought to testify or communicate with the commissioner, but were denied access by DOC along with the reasons for denial and the number of requests to staff, informal grievances, informal grievances made by residents related to participating in council proceedings.

In sum, we urge council to pass the Ease Act and embrace our recommendations to strengthen it.

CCE stands ready to assist Council and DOC with formulating educational materials related to the EASE Act implementation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Giancarlo Cambrellan, Santiago, Policy and Research Associate, DC Justice Lab.

Good afternoon, uh Chairman Pinto and distinguished members of the committee.

My name is Giancarlo Gamer Santiago, and I'm a policy and reachers associate at DC Justice Lab.

I'd like to first thank you, Chairman Pinto for your leadership in introducing the Insurance Access and Supporting Engagement Act for DOC residents of 2025.

I also want to thank the nine Council members who have joined as co-sponsors in support of this important legislation.

The Ease Act is built on the principles of transparency and accountability, advancing civic engagement to strengthen the council's ability to conduct effective oversight and create sound policy.

This legislation codifies the right for incarcerated individuals to testify before DC Council.

It supports education on civic rights in a legislative process and ensures that DC jail residents can communicate and engage with ANC commissioners.

We need this legislation because the Department of Because without it, the Department of Corrections will continue to effectively shut out thousands of district residents from decisions that directly impact their lives, their families, and their communities, further silencing black residents who make up nearly 90% of those incarcerated at DC jail and denying this council first hand accounts that would benefit it work, benefit its work.

As you know, this committee witnessed how the DOC barred the voices of incarcerated residents in DC's food quality and pregnancy related hearings.

And as you noted, even for today's hearing, we proposed a workable solution to allow DOC residents to join remotely with ANC Commissioner, but DOC refused.

And while DOC states it uh it values civic engagement and particip in particip and impart participation in open government among people in its custody, its actions do not reflect that commitment.

The agency emphasizes that it champions these values, yet repeatedly denies those very opportunities when they are presented.

The EAS Act takes comp uh concrete steps to address this problem.

It ensures that incarcerated residents can engage constructively with the local government and help develop the leadership, advocacy, and communication skills along the way.

It restores rights and civic participations that communities of color have fought to secure and have been stripped away through incarceration.

And for the broader community, the EAS Act supports engagement linked to lower recitizen rates, promoting uh successful re-entry, and reinforcing the district's commitment to public safety.

Because civic engagement is a form of education, a form of education, enabling council access also aims to reduce reincarceration costs as uh a rand corporation study highlights that for every dollar spent on prison education, four to five dollars are saved on reincarceration costs within the first three years post-release.

I strongly support this legislation and urge its passage.

My written state my written statement includes more details on a few recommendations to improve to improve and clarify the legislation specific areas.

For instance, the provisions regarding communications between between the ANC and DOC residents can be strengthened, and we must ensure that residents have uh access free of charge to DC council hearings as you noted, including language to specify uh video conferencing and video testimony, and that language is uh is meant to um again include a language specific uh language specific, I can't say the word, but just being more specific in the language so that um DOC doesn't have another work round, just makes it effective uh policymaking.

Um again, thank you for convening the uh today's uh hearing and answer any questions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

DeAndre Davis, State Policy Fellow, DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

Chair President Pinto, members of the committee and committee staff.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

My name is Deontre Davis, and I'm a State Policy Fellow of DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

I am testifying in support of the Ease Act of 2025.

This bill will enable DC residents who are incarcerated in the Department of Corrections facilities to testify without cost barriers before the DC Council.

Currently, DC residents and DLC effectively lack the ability to testify in council hearings.

The majority of residents within DLC facilities, approximately 87 point uh eight percent are black because of the systemic racism that exists within DC's criminal justice system.

Without a way for residents in DOC to communicate directly with the council, the voices of mainly black residents are suppressed in the legislative process.

Residents in DOC also face difficulties communicating directly with the ANC commissioner of DOC.

The requests and grievances residents send in the jail are first sent to a middle person within DOC staff and then they're sent to the ANC Commissioner.

This process causes delays of potential information to be lost, and especially for time-sensitive information involving food quality.

Residents have made numerous complaints about the quality, health, nutritional value, and the cost of food within the jail facilities.

In CTF, for example, 58% of residents have shared that the food is the greatest issue at the facility.

The Ease Act will implement a direct means for residents to share their grievances pertaining to the food quality with the ANC in a timely manner.

The Ease Act will also help address both access and financial barriers for residents who want to testify before the DC Council.

The bill will make communication with the DC Council by electronic devices, internet and mail free for DC residents in DOC.

This removes cost barriers that prevent residents from engaging with the ANC commissioner of DLC and the Council.

The district still needs to address the broader issues of unaffordable communication fees for D DC residents in DOC.

For example, residents have to pay six cents per minute for phone calls and sixteen cents per minute for video call visits.

However, this bill ensures that residents do not face financial hardships when communicating with the DC Council and the ANC Commissioner.

And the Ease Act is a first step to enabling DC residents incarcerated with can share with the council members broader issues of telecommunication fees within the jails.

In conclusion, DC FBI supports the Ease Act because it will enable vulnerable DC residents to connect with the district leadership and their ANC representatives so they can share their lived experiences and concerns within the jail.

This improv this will improve the council's understanding of conditions within DOC facilities, foster improved oversight measures, and provide insights into additional accountability and net legislative measures needed.

My written testimony provides more information of everything I've shared, and I'm happy to discuss this with you further.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much for your testimony and for being here today.

Appreciate it.

We're gonna call our next panel.

Christina Murdock, Caitlin Holbrook.

Kitten Holbrook, are you here?

Okay.

Donovan Carter.

Zachary Ragoni.

Sorry.

Okay, we will begin with Christina Murdoch.

Public witness.

Good afternoon.

My name is Christina Murdoch, and I am proud to be here on behalf of the DC Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and alongside DC Justice Lab and everyone else here fighting for the passing of the Ease Act.

I'm also humbled to be able to speak on behalf of Terry Turner, a 34-year-old black inmate at CDF.

Terry was first incarcerated after a car accident where he was racially profiled and arrested.

He has now spent over two years in jail because no lawyer will fight for him like he will.

While he has no access to the law library at present, which is illegal.

Some of the conditions he has endured are having food trays thrown at him by the correctional officers.

He has breathing issues and bloody noses due to moldy walls and jails in the jail cells he's lived in.

He has a foot that was broken while in jail that never healed properly and has not been seen by the proper uh medical professionals.

He's been on lockdown for weeks, sometimes on end when inmates are required at the very least to get one to two hours outside of their cell per day, which is also illegal to deny that.

He hasn't seen sunshine or the outside in over a year, and most recently he was made to walk down a broken escalator while cuffed.

He fell down the stairs, and every health issue since that incident has been ignored.

Terry wants nothing more than besides the charges against him being dropped to be able to speak for himself.

Since he can't, I'm here, but it should be him.

Everything that Terry and every inmate at DC jails experiences while there is beyond him inhumane treatment.

And I have learned more about humanity from inmates in jail than I have from anyone else in this world.

Many people who have been so oppressed and exploited as incarcerated folks are, actually know what treating someone with dignity and respect means.

Unlike members of the DC Council and the DOC, who go to sleep every night knowing that they are caging humans like animals and still fall asleep soundly in your million-dollar home.

Brook Pinto.

The EASE Act is one small but very necessary step towards repairing the immense harm you and the DC Council have caused and continue to cause.

Myself and the DC Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression demand that you one pass the EASE Act.

Two, hold Thomas Faust, the DC jail correctioners, off correctional officers, and all of DC DOC accountable.

And three, put in action an emergency order to taint change the conditions at DC jails.

It is the least you can do.

Thank you.

Caitlin Holbrook, public witness.

Thank you, Councilmember Pinto and staff on the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee.

My name is Caitlin Holbrook.

I'm a constituent of Ward 6 and a law student at Georgetown, here to testify in support of the ensuring access and supporting engagement or Ease Act with some amendments.

I am thrilled to be here today to testify in support of the Ease Act that fine will finally expand civil and civic engagement to people in the D.C.

jails and uphold and upholds democratic values at a time when American democracy is so fraught and the recognition of the First Amendment is so penalized.

The Ease Act is the next step in the recognition of the protections of the First Amendment for all D.C.

residents.

Incarceration does not and should not eradicate the individual right to free speech.

The Supreme Court held that prison walls do not form a barrier separating incarcerated people from the protections of the Constitution.

In federal agency rulemaking, we have also come to realize the public has a right to notice and comment on federal rules that relate and affect them before they go into effect.

DC has seemed to have a similar understanding of these protections as in 2020, DC restored the vote to incarcerated individuals, and in 2021, the DC jails voted for and received their first ANC commissioner.

Without passage of the Ease Act, DC continues to bypass expertise required to pass efficacious law.

People in the DC jails, like the rest of the community are experts on being D.C.

residents.

However, people in the DC jails are the only experts at what it's like to be in the DC jails.

They have greater expertise than most, if not all people, hired to draft policies behind the closed doors of the Wilson building or the Capitol.

In my own experience of drafting policy, had I not spoken to or surveyed individuals in the DC jails, I would have not known the nuances of eating while incarcerated in DC, nor would I know just how egregious the experience of eating in the DC jails was, which informed the Fresh Starts Act.

Thus it is imperative that council members have the opportunity to ask questions and get feedback directly and in real time from DC resident experts in the jails as they do from those residents outside the jails.

The denial of civic engagement in the DC jails is part of a long history of the United States and DC's denial of black people's voice in law creation.

Black D.C.

residents are experts in creating policy that serves them effectively without creating more harm.

The DC jails is a location of silencing our black community members where 91% of the people incarcerated in the DC jails are black.

I hear advocates sometimes say, I want to give a voice to the voiceless.

Now there may be those that lack physical voice, but there are no silent people.

There are people silenced through a cacophony of racism, mass incarceration, ableism, paternalism, patriarchy, white saviorism, and state section and extermination.

Lawmakers and lawyers should be removing such barriers through bills like the Ease Act rather than speaking on behalf of people.

Simply knowing how to write a law does not make lawyers and lawmakers experts on what the law needs to accomplish and how it will do so.

Lawyers and lawmakers should simply simply be legalese translators, translating the expertise of D.C.

residents into law.

To do that effectively, we must be able to learn from the expertise from all D.C.

residents by removing the barriers that are silencing them.

To do this, you must pass the Ease Act and amend with cost barriers, amend to remove cost barriers and ensure access to accountability measures for the DOC to uphold free speech.

Thank you, and I'm available for questions.

Thank you.

Donovan Carter, public witness.

Good afternoon, Chair Pinto, other members of the committee.

My name is Donovan Carter, and I'm a student attorney with the re-entry clinic at the Howard University's School of Law, Clinical Law Center.

Today I'm here to tell you about the dire need for the Ease Act, which ensures that voting members of the public have access to their elected officials.

And this is an important voting block that deserves adequate representation.

It's important that the council passes the Ease Act in here as well.

This act affirmatively encourages, fosters, and reinforces community engagement, all while building better citizens.

And the Ease Act returns political agency to these important stakeholders who have been cast aside.

Both of these advances support successful reentry by ensuring that connected, engaged neighbors return home safely to their communities.

These residents have a right to be heard, especially when regarding matters that deal with public safety and corrections.

This act is not some sort of um get out of jail free card or a day pass to be feared.

It is instead an extension of the rights enshrined in our Constitution.

And additionally, this touches a racial equity element as well, as uh many have said before.

Black residents make up 44% of DC's population, but nearly 90% of the incarcerated population in the district.

This is a severe silencing of this vital population, as these residents are a neighbors.

They're part of the district, and excluding their access to government is excluding them from complete citizenship.

Incarceration alone is not at a forfeiting of political rights.

Now, bringing these residents into the council room, even virtually brings agency invisibility to this population.

As we know, correction or any sort of rehabilitation cannot occur while people are siloed and wholly removed from the levers of power within a society.

This also speaks to transparency issues as this enables the conditions of DLC facilities to be seen and ensuring accountability.

It's imperative that these residents have their voices heard when the council considers things like food fees and confinement conditions of the DOFC facilities.

As we know what DOCC says and what they do, there's a wide gap between these things.

This act would ensure that residents and their advocates can be heard at the legislative level, and it is imperative that advocacy and confidentiality especially are protected for these residents when they're in communications with their ANC commissioner and with council members as well.

The right to political activity also includes the right to speak with their representatives with advocacy or representation if need be.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak on this issues and the Rancho Clinic's written testimony will provide more information and we'll be happy to uh discuss this further.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sachary Ragoni, public witness.

Good afternoon, Chairwoman Pinto and committee staff.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

My name is Zach Ragoni, and my work sits at the intersection of criminal justice reform and system performance.

What it actually takes for accountability-based systems to function the way they're intended.

I know this work from the policy side, and I know it from the other side as well.

I'm here today in my personal capacity.

The district already made a decision.

Incarceration does not end your citizenship.

That happened when voting rights were restored.

This bill asks a simpler question.

Do we actually mean it?

We should.

And how we implement it will determine whether this strengthens the system or becomes symbolic.

We've recognized individuals in the DOC custody as voters, but we have not yet recognized them as voices.

And if we don't close that gap, if we say people are constituents but treat them as invisible, we're not making a policy mistake, we're making a credibility mistake.

A system that expects accountability from people has to maintain its own legitimacy.

And legitimacy isn't built through statements, it's built by aligning values and reality.

This isn't just theoretical.

Research found that civ uh civically engaged individuals were half as likely to be rearrested.

This bill isn't just about increased participation.

It's about public safety for this city.

If done right, this creates something rare: a system that is more trusted, better informed, and more likely to produce the outcomes we actually want.

But that only happens if it's implemented seriously, because there are risks.

First, implementation.

The DOC has cited staffing and connectivity constraints.

But movement already happens every day for court, medical programming, and technology already exists.

So the question isn't whether this is possible, it's whether it's a priority.

And if something is treated as optional, it will always appear operationally difficult.

Second, there is the risk of tokenization.

I know what it feels like to be in a system that processes you without ever actually seeing you.

Creating the ability to testify does not guarantee meaningful participation.

If people are allowed to speak but their input isn't actually considered, they aren't truly seen.

That's performative.

And performative participation doesn't build trust, it erodes it.

Which is why how this is implemented matters.

If we're going to put resources into this, it has to produce real value.

So the question isn't just access, it's whether participation is real, functional, and taken seriously.

If it's not, we don't expand civic engagement.

We send the message that it doesn't matter.

I know what message that message does to people.

I've lived it.

And I've seen what happens when people come home feeling like the system never acknowledged them.

That disengagement doesn't stay inside the walls.

It comes home with them.

I support this bill because it can move us towards a system that is more legitimate and more effective.

But that outcome isn't guaranteed.

You can't expect someone to return as a stakeholder in a community that spent years telling them they had nothing to state.

This bill is a step towards closing that gap.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much for your testimony.

We're going to call our next panel, Jaden Arna Salam.

Nikki A.

Sharp.

Tara Libert.

Robert Barton.

Tara Libert.

Robert Barton, you here?

Okay.

April song.

April song?

Okay.

Herbert Robinson.

Thank you.

We'll go, Robert, then Miss Song right here.

Yep, third seat.

And then Herbert Robinson.

Welcome to you all.

We will begin with Tara Libert, co-founder and executive director of the Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop and Thrive Under 25 Coalition.

And if you could turn your microphone on, sorry.

Good afternoon.

I'm Tara Liebert, a resident, a proud resident of Ward One, co-founder of Free Minds, current executive director, and with the Thrive Under 25 Coalition that works to support youth under the age of 25 in the criminal legal system.

I am here today to express my absolute enthusiastic excitement, passionate thrill about the ESAC.

And I want to thank you, Councilwoman, and the rest of your co-sponsors for introducing this bill.

This will make DC more of a leader in our country in understanding support for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals.

While my colleagues have talked eloquently about oversight and how this act will build real solutions, will reduce racial discrimination and have us have a true democracy.

I'm here today to say the impact of what this bill will do for those who are participating in testimony.

We have seen over 20 years at the book club at the jail when members are given meaningful access to a platform to share their voices.

They care about their community, they come up with incredible solutions.

They are much more their re-entry success skyrockets, and studies show that a perception of community acceptance incredibly increases re-entry success.

We see it, we know it.

We have in our book clubs, our members do dialogue.

It's not just something to read their testimony like we heard today.

We need to have the directly impacted person and answer the questions, the back and forth.

Free mind's value is the voices of those who are unheard.

When we as a city silence those voices and do not have them literally at the table, we are doing a disservice, and we are continuing perpetuating a system of racial discrimination and access silencing.

So I just wanted to say that.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Robert Barton, executive director of More Than Our Crimes.

Good afternoon, Chairperson Pinto and Staff.

My name is Robert Barton, and I'm a DC resident, a return citizen and a co-founder and executive director of More Than Our Crimes, a nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated DC residents.

I spent 30 years incarcerated before turning home last year.

One of the reasons we found in More than Our Crimes was to reconnect DC residents behind the wall to the broader DC community.

While they may have committed serious mistakes, they remain members of the city's social favorite.

They are parents, siblings, children, and if our work is successful, they will someday become community leaders.

Civic engagement is a situation focus of our work because we believe evidence increasingly shows that when individuals see themselves as citizens, they are treat and they are treated as such, both institutional values and the risk of recidivism decrease.

When people are given opportunities to participate in civic life, they begin to invest in their communities and they and in their futures in ways that benefit public safety and stripping democratic culture.

For the most part of my dog life, decisions were made about my community, my family, my future, without any meaningful way for them to for us to participate.

Policies debated in rooms like this one shaped the conditions of my confinement, the opportunities developed to me, and the challenge I will face when I return home.

Yet my voice and the voices of thousands of other were lousy absent from the process.

In 2020, the district took an important and higher step by restoring the right to vote to incarcerated residents.

That decision affirmed that we remain members of this community.

But voting, while ascension is only a part of democratic participation.

A function that democracy requires ongoing engagement.

It requires the ability to testify on legislation, to communicate with elected officials, and to contribute ideas about parts that affect our lives and our neighborhoods.

The Ease Act recognize this reality.

Allow individuals in DC jail to testify before the council and engage with the ANCs is not simply a symbolic gesture.

It is a practical investment in safer communities and strong civic culture.

When people are treated as participants rather than as problems to be managed, they begin to see themselves different.

They begin to act differently.

Active citizenship reduces recidivism.

It builds responsibility, connection, and purpose.

It creates a pathway from incarcerated to leadership.

I have seen this tra I have seen this transformation not only in my own life, but in the lives of countless men and women who, when given the opportunity, choose to contribute positively to the communities to which they will one day return.

Those who have experienced the conservation often have insights their policymakers cannot gain from reports or statistics alone.

Their perspectives can help improve programs, strengthen accountability, and ensure their parties are grounded in reality.

Including their voices make government more effective.

But as the Ease Act ports out, education on their rights and how DC government workers needed to make the ability to testify meaningful.

And the more modern crime team would like to uh ask to be your partner in this meaningful way.

I've seen firsthand when I go into the jail with the leading women voters that peer-to-peer education is the way to go, and we can all for that.

At the same time, we acknowledge that many DC residents remain incarcerated in federal facilities far from home.

This bill cannot fully address that reality, but it represents an important step forward until broader access is achieved.

We will continue working to assure that the voice of D.C.

residents in federal custody are heard in the city.

Democracy is strong when it includes those over time.

Okay.

Thank you, uh, Councilmember Pinto, and thank you for letting me be here.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

April Song, public witness.

Hi, good afternoon, Chair Pinto.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the right to access elected officials that would be codified in the Ease Act.

As you know, at stake here are the testimonial rights of over 2,000 voting Washington, D.C.

constituents.

Countless others that came before or after them, and every issue facing these people, from medical care to conditions of confinement to decisions affecting their families.

My name is April Song.

I am an attorney with the Washington, D.C.

firm of Wiley Rhine.

First, I really want to sincerely thank you and your staff and the nine co-sponsoring members of our legislation for seeing clearly the need for the Ease Act.

Your leadership and work on this issue is invaluable.

From a decade of experience, including almost seven years at a premier regulatory and policy firm, I know that my work boils down to one thing.

I help clients access their elected officials, explaining that engagement, testimony is powerful.

It creates change.

The premise of my work is in the First Amendment, the constitutional right to petition the government for address.

In DC, this right to petition is in place for all except residents of the DC Department of Corrections.

That's why I lead the team providing pro bono counsel to DC Justice Lab in collaboration with the Second Look Project to advocate for the Ease Act.

When my clients successfully engage with their elected representatives, I see the trust it creates in law and government.

I see the change it makes.

What this committee has not seen is the impact of the denial of this right.

When denied the right to petition, people feel abandoned by the city government in the basic elements of their lives.

Whether there is something to eat, enough clothing in the winter, and access to family.

Here, I want to recognize two officials you've already heard from today that I've had the privilege to work with myself.

ANC Cunningham and before him in his position, ANC Hayes.

They shoulder burdens no other elected officials have, with energy and grace, born from necessity.

They are the lone audible voice.

ANC Cunningham speaks today for thousands of constituents until the Ease Act passes.

On behalf of my firm, my clients, and myself, I petition this committee to advance the Ease Act so that incarcerated residents too may exercise this right to petition.

I close my testimony by recognizing the 11 incarcerated people who registered to testify today, but were barred from appearing before you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Herbert Robinson, community organizer, Growing Pain Solutions.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Councilwoman Pinto and members of the committee.

My name is Herbert Robinson, and I'm a Washington, D.C.

residence, a justice impacted community leader, and the co-founder of Growing Pain Solutions, an organization dedicated to building inclusive communities and supporting people impacted by incarceration through education, advocacy, and civic engagement.

I'm here today to express my strong support for the Ease Act.

I return home from incarceration to determine to make sure the voices of justice impacted residents are not ignored or erased.

That experience is exactly why I'm here today.

Too often the people most impacted by policy decisions have the least opportunity to speak.

The Ease Act addresses that problem directly.

First, all DC residents deserves the right to be heard, including those incarcerated at central detention facility and central treatment facility.

Laws passed by council affected daily lives from living conditions to family access, health care, education, and re-entry opportunities.

Yet currently they do not they cannot testify about those issues in the very hearings where decisions are being made.

Allowing virtual testimony would give the council direct insight from people who are living those experiences in real time.

Reports and secondhand information can only go but so far.

Hearing directly from residents inside DC DOC facilities with improved transparency and strengthen oversight.

Second, the legislation is also about equity and democracy.

Black residents make up 43% of the district's population.

Yet 92% of the incarcerated population at DC jailed is black.

That makes up almost 10% of our population.

So that messes up our voting and um where effectively silences a large segment of black voters in our city.

This is not consistent with the values of the District of Columbia.

Third, this bill strengthens rehabilitation and successful reentry.

Civic engagement bills responsibility, connections, and investment in community, where people inside incarcerated facilities are able to speak with policymakers and their ANC commissioners.

They remain connected to the neighborhoods they will return to.

A lot of those same residents are the ones that lose the access to those tablets, which is considered a privilege.

What we're doing here is trying to make this something that's their right.

So we need to make sure they have access to a certain way to do this testimony.

Um that tablet ain't gonna be it, that can be taken from them.

Let's stop talking about that tab.

Uh with this, finally, the district has the opportunity to lead the nation and recognizing that the constitutional rights, again, it's a right that we're trying to enforce here, and civic engagement should not be, should not stop at the jail gates.

The technology already exists within DOC facilities that can make this impossible with no additional costs.

And I appreciate you all allowing me to testify, and I'm willing to ask any questions.

Great.

Thank you.

And let me just ask you about the tablet piece.

So what do you think should be the all of the access points for people to make sure that they could always testify?

If the tablets are not the best avenue, what is?

They use a system for their parole hearings, they use a system for their court system for the court hearings, and they also have another system that's in a day room that they were using for virtual visits.

Um that tablet is something people take into their sale and things like that, something that they kind of use as a possession.

I don't think that's the right tool to be given.

Like this should be something that oversight and things they can be uh followed up with.

Uh these security issues and um things like that, staff shortage.

Man, it's been going on for 20 years.

What is DOC like when is DOC gonna do something about that?

That can't keep being the same issue that we facing.

Like contract to work out.

That's an option.

Like DOC is holding on to something and they paying over the uh, I want to say they pay like in 2024, it's like 174% in overtime over their budget.

Like, what is the problem with hiring and keeping people to work there?

It's a bigger issue.

Like, we need to worry about DOC.

Somebody keeping some money, somebody's doing underhanded things here that's trapping people in certain conditions.

Like it we need to be worrying about some other stuff too.

But I appreciate you introducing this bill.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I know I appreciate those ideas too to make sure that there's an always accessible process and not just to be relying on one piece of technology that might not actually be available to everybody.

So that's really helpful.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you for the work that you do.

Lori Pitts.

Elizabeth Eddings.

Elizabeth Eddings?

Okay, great.

Take your time.

Just her.

Okay.

We will begin with Lori Petts, founding director of Voices Unbarred.

Good afternoon, Chairman Pinto and members of the committee and staff.

My name is Lori Pitts, and I'm the founding director of Voices Unbarred.

We are a DC-based nonprofit that amplifies the voices of people impacted by incarceration and reimagines the criminal legal system through theater.

In our programs, currently incarcerated residents create performances based on their live experiences and ideas for change.

Because they cannot leave the facility, we hire formerly incarcerated actors to perform their words out in the community, including for legislators.

So you can imagine my organization is thrilled by the Ease Act, which allows the council to hear firsthand accounts directly from people impacted by incarceration without middlemen and the current systemic barriers to direct communication.

Within our work, we believe that those who have experienced a system know it best and should speak for themselves.

I see time and time again at our performances the power of first hand accounts.

One can talk about facts, figures, see pictures, but nothing takes the place of hearing a personal account.

I've done this work for eight years, yet no statistic was as visceral as watching a participant in one facility struggle to sign into my workshop because he couldn't read or write.

And at that moment, it hit me that a majority of correctional education is geared towards GED programs, and there's a whole population reading at a primary level who are falling through the cracks.

And that was a realization gap for me, yet I still couldn't tell you his experience in the facility or what he needs.

The Ease Act would not only let someone like him testify directly using his voice, it would allow him to reveal his specific needs or new or strengthened programs that could set residents up for success upon release.

Similarly, reading about the effects of solitary confinement is one thing, but seeing one of our most outgoing participants return from restrictive housing withdrawn, depressed, and unsure of himself is another.

The impact becomes undeniable when you have a direct link to someone, and only they can share their experiences.

That level of transparency, seeing the human impact that cannot be altered, watered down, or hidden, is vital for effective oversight of DOC facilities.

Passing the Ease Act will also give meaningful access to the civic process for residents and strengthen connection to the local community, a factor we know reduces recidivism.

I've seen through my work the impact that feeling heard or unheard has on people.

At a recent program we ran in PG County jail, 44% of participants arrived feeling unheard.

And by the end, 100% of graduates felt their voices mattered and felt more connected to how they impact others.

By having the opportunity to share their stories and ideas for change on a public stage, their confidence, belief in the value of what they have to say, and understanding how they fit into a community and the desire to grew.

These skills are a prerequisite for successful re-entry and public health and safety.

Based on this data, if given the opportunity to engage in the civic process more directly on this public stage, currently incarcerated residents will have similar, if not stronger, results across the board.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak on these issues, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Elizabeth Eddings, the CEO of Eddings Consulting Firm LLC.

Grand Rising, uh Chairperson Pinto, members of the Council, uh, former uh ANC Hayes, and including the current one, um, Harold Cunningham.

Um, please call me Candace Eddings, that's my little name.

Uh, I am the founder of the Eddings Consulting Firm, LLC, uh a district-based certified business enterprise.

I am also one of the founding um members of the descendants of the United States Chattel Slavery, which is a nationwide nonprofit organization dedicated to uplifting foundational black American freedmen across the United States with a focus on supporting incarcerated and formally incarcerated individuals through employment, housing, and re-entry resources.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Through my work in the community, I have seen firsthand how many residents, especially those who have experienced incarceration or systematic barriers, often feel disconnected from the civic process and government systems.

Many individuals simply do not know how to engage with the legislative process or advocate for issues that directly impact their lives.

In many cases, the the cost barriers or the lack of information and limited access to civic education prevents meaningful participation.

The Ease Initiative is important because it helps remove these barriers by supporting education about civic rights and the legislative process.

The district can empower the residents to better understand how government works and how they can participate in shaping policies that affect their own communities.

Ensuring the right to communicate with government reduces financial obstacles to participation and requiring tracking, reporting, and accountability are all important steps towards building a stronger public trust.

When the residents feel informed and included, they are far more likely to engage constructively with the government and their communities.

So as a uh district business owner, a consultant who provides training in conflict resolution and educational programming, I strongly support initiatives that expand civic education and public participation.

Public uh programs like Ease create pathways for residents to become informed, engaged, and empowered members of our city.

And one more thing before I go, um, I would like to say that I come in the spirit of our late great Dr.

Francis Chris Welsing, which today is her birthday, and it is also mine.

So I am here testifying for the inmates at the DC jail.

My honor.

Thank you.

Well, thank you very much for being here today and all the work that you do, and happy birthday.

Thank you.

It's great to have you here.

Um Ms.

Pitts, I want to ask you about the um work that you do.

Do you all do any work with DYRS and exposing young people to theater?

Um, not as of right now.

Um we've worked with students in the public school system who were impacted by incarceration or had family members, but right now we're primarily working with adults.

Okay.

Well, we are open to it.

Great.

I would love to follow up with you after this about ways that we may be able to expand those opportunities to young people as well because I agree it's extremely important.

Um so thank you for what you do as well.

Okay.

Thank you, both.

Thanks.

Okay, we are going to call our next panel, um, all of whom are here to testify on OUC and the bells there.

We have Amy Morrow.

We're gonna pull a fifth chair up as well.

Robert Holman, Dave Stadter, David Hoagland, and Robert McClintock.

If we could pull a fifth chair over and we're gonna hear you all as one panel so we can have a conversation.

Thank you all.

Would you all mind scooching down a little bit so we can all Mr.

Stadter, would you mind scooching down a little bit?

I'm sorry.

It's okay.

Great.

Okay.

Thank you all.

Welcome.

Uh we will hear first from Amy Morrow, public witness.

Good afternoon.

I am Amy Morrow, and I am testifying today in my personal capacity as a lifelong DC resident, career DC government public servant, and former chief of staff of the DC Fire and EMS department from 2015 to 2023.

I am pleased to testify in support of this legislation, which is necessary because of structural challenges that have plagued the Office of Unified Communications since its creation over 20 years ago.

Despite OUC directors agreeing that the fire department's medical director serves as the medical director of the OUC, whether his direction is followed, frequently depends on the circumstances, convenience, or politics, rather than the best interest of EMS patients.

Following the clinical direction of the medical director should never be optional.

This legislation will ensure that it no longer is.

I have worked on EMS reform in the district since 2007.

Thanks in part to strong medical oversight, the district's cardiac arrest survival rate went from below the national average in 2014 to tied for first place in the nation in 2023.

Despite these gains, our EMS system is not performing as well as it should be.

In part because DC's 911 system continues to be prone to errors, inaccurate dispatch of fire department resources, and a chronic lack of transparency.

It is past time to fix these deficiencies.

This legislation provides an opportunity to apply the same lessons learned from strong medical oversight and better medical training and certification of employees to our 911 system.

Our DC EMS reforms followed these principles.

Act in the best interest of patients, be transparent with data, apologize for mistakes, and relentlessly apply lessons learned to improve operations.

Every agency makes mistakes, including public safety agencies whose decisions can mean the difference between life and death.

I have sat in that seat as an executive leader when our agency made mistakes that contributed to bad patient outcomes.

When that happens, it is heartbreaking, but it is a reality of practicing medicine.

Our practice after a medical error was to review the case and disclose to the patient or to the family of the patient that protocols were not followed and that action would be taken to prevent the mistake from happening again.

Not once in my eight years tenure as chief of staff did a family or patient sue the department as a result of our disclosures.

Nor did they turn to the media for answers, because we provided answers no matter how difficult.

And importantly, we apologized.

OUC should be held to the same standards and guidelines.

Instead, known mistakes are not included in its reporting, and it continues to withhold facts and categorically deny reasonable FOIA requests, most recently in response to the grieving mother of Will Auster tag.

The FOIA response to Will's mother is part of what compelled me to testify here today.

It was not acceptable.

If there is one thing I want to convey to the council, it is that 911 performance cannot be measured by speed of answer alone.

I applaud Director McGaffin and her team for improvements in hiring and speed of answer and dispatch times.

But answering the call is only a fraction of what the OUC is responsible for.

This brings me to my final point, and that is the structural challenges that result from having an independent OUC.

This is not a personal attack, as we have seen the same problems over and over again, no matter who is mayor or who is OUC director.

In my experience, when legitimate questions are raised, even when substantiating data and examples of serious problems are provided as evidence.

Even after years of trying to work collaboratively to address legitimate concerns on behalf of citizens and the fire department, criticisms are treated as merely infighting between sibling agencies.

Yes, I'm finishing up.

The focus is always on TERF, personalities, and other allegedly hidden motives.

As the council evaluates the performance of the OUC, it should focus on what matters most: public safety.

As you do so, I urge for your guiding principles to be the same as those resulted that resulted in historic gains in the DC EMS system.

Gains that translate into saving lives.

Thank you.

Dr.

Robert Holman.

Chair Pinto, I'm Dr.

Robert Holman, currently the associate dean for admissions at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

I served as the medical director for DC Fire and EMS from 2016 to 2024.

Thank you for letting me testify in support of the emergency medical services clarification amendment act of 2026.

This bill is necessary because the lack of clarity in governing language has allowed the OUC, while working cordially with its partner agency, DC FEMS, to blatantly disregard its medical oversight.

This bill will eliminate that confusion.

Potential upsides to this direct medical oversight should be seen in at least three specific areas.

Nurse triage line referrals, dispatch system editing, and in quality improvement.

In FY25, the OUC referred less than 3% of its EMS calls to the nurse triage line.

Sampling audits of calls over a two-year period showed that 22% of all EMS calls met eligibility criteria to be referred to the nurses.

Having a medical director with authority should correct the gross underperformance in this area.

As you know, Chair Pinto, the PowerPoint dispatch system was chosen by the OUC in 2022 to 2023 and required hundreds of hours of FEMS time to correct it prior to launch in February 2024.

OUC launched PowerPoint without making any of the crucial changes insisted upon by the medical director.

For example, there is still a dispatch code called BLS on conconscious patient always needs an ALS response.

This bill should also fix this.

Quality improvement, the OUC website demonstrates that their focus on metrics is solely about time.

Adding the medical director's oversight will also bring in important quality improvement features, such as correcting over-dispatch of ALS resources for a BLS call, improving cardiac arrest performance, and correcting the OUC performance dashboard, among others.

In closing, I would like to emphasize that EMS and the nation's capital will never be its best without a highly functioning 911 call center.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dr.

Holman.

Dave Stadter, Stadter 911 Communications.

Hi, how are you?

I've closely watched EMS in D.C.

for a half century.

I can confidently state that the greatest improvements have occurred over the last decade.

The Bowser administration should be very proud of that fact.

The people alongside me, along with shared the shared vision of Chiefs Donnelly and Dean and a dedicated staff of firefighters, medics, and EMTs turned things around.

But even their great skills only go so far.

The limiting factor has been DC 911.

To provide effective emergency medical services, it must be joined at the hip with emergency call taking and dispatching.

911 is a key part of EMS, but OUC treats DC fire and EMS more like an obstacle than a partner.

They should be acting together in the best interest of EMS patients.

Without this bill, that won't happen.

Dr.

Holman said something quite astounding.

This one statement may be the most important reason for the bill.

It's in his written testimony, too.

He said OUC launched PowerPoint without making the changes insisted upon by the medical director.

This means the person legally and ethically required to act in the best interest of EMS patients was overruled by the 911 director.

This is very different than the director's many statements and testimony about working collaboratively on PowerPoint with Dr.

Holman here.

Dr.

Holman also highlighted OUC's nurse triage line failures.

In selling PowerPoint, OUC's director repeatedly testified it would greatly increase nurse triage line referrals.

The disappointing stats that Dr.

Holman just shared, well, that's what comes when you get a 911 director making the important medical decisions instead of a medical director.

Here's another issue.

DC Fire and EMS reviews patient care after each cardiac arrest.

What they can't review is what happens before they arrive.

The medical director and review panel aren't allowed to access 911 calls.

So why is that so important?

Well, let's recall the sudden cardiac arrest of Will Ostratg.

His mother, Stephanie Clemens, testified here at the January meeting.

The staff reviewing Ostratag's death had no clue about the many minutes OUC lost before alerting the paramedics stationed at the firehouse just next door.

Same with the December 22nd cardiac arrest that I've talked about before.

The review panel was again blind to what may have been key information impacting that patient's survival.

I'm talking about a five-minute gap where OUC didn't answer the radio or the questions from firefighters who were trying to get into an apartment where a patient, home alone, collapsed while talking with 9-1-1.

The review and the truth about these cases and many others remained incomplete without including OUC's role.

And what did Heather McGaffin, the director, do about two cardiac arrests?

Apparently nothing.

Neither is listed on OUC's performance dashboard.

As I wrap up, Chief Donnelly always reminds us that he runs the city's third largest health care system.

But you can't be properly responsible for that system when the doctor in charge has no control over one of its crucial elements.

If things go badly during the 911 call, there may be no recovery for the patient.

It's time to put this critical EMS component where it belongs.

That is under the leadership of the D.C.

Fire and EMS Department's medical director, one medical director, with everyone moving in the same direction, not to protect TRF and egos at OUC, but to protect the public, period.

Thank you, Mr.

Stadter.

Robert McClintock, Assistant to the General, President for Technical Assistance and Information Resources, International Association of Firefighters.

Thank you, Chair Pinto.

Sorry.

Thank you, Chair Pinto.

I am also a retired fire captain and power medic with extensive experience in EMS 911 operations and emergency communications.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify in strong support of the EMS Clarification Amendment Act of 2026.

This legislation takes an important and necessary step to ensure the district's emergency medical services system continues to advance in efficiency and effectiveness while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy, transparency, and clinical oversight.

As emergency response demands grow grow more complex, it is critical that statutory authority, operational practice, and national best standards remain fully aligned.

This bill appropriately clarifies the role of the Fire and EMS Medical Director, explicitly codifying that this position also serves as the medical director of the Office of Unified Communications.

By affirming that the medical director provides oversight, supervision, and final decision making authority for all clinical aspects of pre-hospital emergency and medical services, the district ensures clear accountability for medical decisions that directly affect patient outcomes.

Emergency medical response does not begin when a unit arrives on scene.

It begins at the moment the call is answered.

Aligning medical oversight across the full continuum of care strengthens patient safety and system integrity.

The bill also makes explicit the medical director's authority to select, revise, and establish dispatch protocols and emergency response plans, as well as to oversee quality assurance and continuous quality improvement programs for both EMS dispatch and field services.

This ensures that clinical protocols are evidence-based, consistently applied, and continuously evaluated.

These are the hallmarks of a modern, high performing EMS system.

While OUC may already require EMD certification, placing this requirement in statute is a critical safeguard.

Codification ensures that national best practice training standards are preserved regardless of changes in leadership or administrative priorities.

EMD certification.

EMD certification equips call takers and dispatch with the skills needed to provide accurate medical instructions, prioritize calls appropriately, and deploy the right resources at the right time while potentially making a life-saving difference before the first responders arrive.

Together, these changes promote consistency, transparency, and clinical excellence across the district's emergency medical service system.

They reinforce the principle that medical oversight must extend seamlessly from the 911 call center through on-scene care, and that all personnel involved in emergency medical response must meet clearly defined nationally recognized standards.

Many urban fire departments like yours already have the system in place with proven success.

This bill clarifies authority, formalizes best practices, and strengthens accountability.

These are prudent measured reforms that will improve patient outcomes, support frontline professionals, and increase public confidence in the district's emergency response system.

For these reasons, I respectfully urge the Council to adopt the EMS Clarification Amendment Act of 2026 as it reflects thoughtful governance and strong commitment to ensuring that every district resident receives timely medically sound and professionally guided emergency care.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much.

Dave Hoagland, President, District of Columbia Firefighters Association, IAFF, Local 36.

Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, Councilmember Pinto and members of the Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today in support of the Emergency Medical Services Clarification Act of 2026.

This legislation is key to ensuring the safety and health of local 36 members.

It's directly related to our strategic priorities of health, safety, and dignity of our members.

During your tenure as chair of the Judiciary and Public Safety, you have heard time and time again about our call volume and continued upward trend.

As this call volume continues to rise, it's important for us to look at the root causes behind this rise.

Last week, Chief Donnelly was quoted in an NBC 4 investigative report saying our apparatus, quote, take a beating.

We are in 100 percent agreement that this assessment is correct.

However, he failed to acknowledge that our members on that apparatus take a beating too.

We are disappointed that Chief Donnelly perceives the high call volume as a badge of honor.

Sadly, it's an admission that his workforce is overtaxed.

One of the root causes of this issue begins at OUC with improper vetting.

Day in and day out, OUC dispatches calls for what is a perceived emergency by the caller, failing to ask the needed questions to substantiate the event.

A good example of this would be for a car accident.

The caller is passing by and sees two vehicles that have been in an accident and calls 911 stating the same.

However, the caller is simply reporting what they see and what they feel is the issue and unable to validate as they are traversing the roadway in their vehicle.

Ninety-seven percent of American adults own a cell phone.

The days of calling on behalf of someone else where communication is limited is in an era of years gone by.

Another solution is by reviewing calls in real time and having the authority to change responses based on trends seen in dispatching.

We can help reduce the amount of duplicate runs our units respond to and prevent over dispatching, where multiple units are sent to an assignment for a call that may only require an ambulance.

Our own department has made great strides in our EMS care by utilizing a continuous quality improvement model.

It has improved our pre-hospital care tremendously.

Members are able to receive necessary remedial training without fear of disciplinary action.

By employing the same model for OUC, we can ensure that they are able to get access to the necessary remedial training needed to more accurately dispatch.

OUC call takers and dispatchers are the first people to make contact with people in need of EMS care.

They are under a lot of pressure to dispatch calls quickly and accurately.

If you eliminate a fear of disciplinary action for inaccurate dispatch, they will be more willing to take their time and accurately dispatch the appropriate resource.

While EMD training is a great first step, we think EMS certifications like emergency medical responders should be considered to give call takers more of a background in EMS.

A better understanding of the medical emergency a caller's experiencing can aid in properly dispatching the correct resources.

Other comparable jurisdictions like New Orleans and Los Angeles require their call takers to possess EMS certifications.

It's critically important that with the type of APCO model OUC follows that they have a real-time dynamic communication with the medical director so that our dispatch response cards can be adjusted based on patient outcomes in the field.

Our resources will work well when they are being dispatched accurately.

To steal uh Dr.

Holman's slogan on the NTL, right care right now.

If we have the right resource for the right emergency, our units will not get tied up on low priority runs.

This will help address provider burnout and low morale from running incidents that do not warrant a 901 response.

Our department does not have anyone reviewing medical incidents with any regularity or structure since our Aqua unit was dissolved and removed from OUC.

We hope this legislation will help restore the pivotal role local 36 members played in reviewing incidents for accurate dispatch and positive patient outcomes.

This bill is in a step in the right direction towards approving trust between OUC and the DCFD.

The working relationship between the two agencies of pivotal.

Too often our feedback and input gets dismissed even though we are the end users of the OUC system.

If OUC is not supporting the end user or a members on the front line, then our ability to provide efficient service is diminished.

It's parent that we have substantive and reciprocal avenues of communication on a continual basis to improve efficiency.

We need accurate dispatching to ensure we can help people in their worst moments.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

Thank you, President Hogland.

And thank you all for being here and all of your work on this important issue and agency.

Because frankly, when I've asked at other performance oversight hearings to the agencies of what those numbers are, I don't always get a clear answer.

So I think you talked about in your testimony that only 3 percent of calls were diverted when really 22 percent are meeting the criteria.

As you and others on the panel look at other EMS departments across the country, what trends are you seeing in nurse triage lines?

Are there being more calls diverted that you're seeing in other departments?

Um in Wake County, North Carolina, whose NTL was based on ours and which launched in 2022, they have seen an upward trend over the years.

And in 2025, they referred 18 percent of all of their EMS calls to the nurse triage line.

And I think that's terrific in three years to accomplish that.

But we've known for some years that our rate by expert paramedic uh sampled audio reviews uh that 22 percent should be the number.

And we've shared that with OUC constantly.

I think one of the issues is really um before they launched the power phone, we had designed what they call the sick card to facilitate the call taker referring those calls to the nurse triage line.

And um they did not launch that sick card as we wished.

And uh from your experience working um with our departments here, what why do you think that is?

Why is our uptick of not matching what what we're seeing in other jurisdictions?

So I think it is um there's a little bit of um consideration of turf war a little bit.

The OUC wants a little bit more independence.

They don't want some medical oversight.

And when we tried to say the sick card, let's work with you, they actually, once they launched PowerPoint in February of 24, they said, well, we'll try and do the sick card with you, and they never did.

Um we thought it was very feasible.

We thought it would get us to where we wanted to in terms of uh triaging appropriately these calls to the nurse triage line to you know the right care right now, the right places.

Um but they weren't willing to work with um the fire department.

And I'm not really sure why.

Okay.

And what kind of, and this is kind of to anybody, what kind of medically trained personnel do you all think would do the best job of triaging those EMS calls to the nurse triage line?

Go ahead, Ms.

Morrow.

Well, I think we know that if they have better medical training, that um the numbers of calls referred to the NTL would go up significantly.

We did do a the You said if they had if the people take um answering the call and triaging the call had more medical training.

So for example, in 2019, after we launched NTL, we were disappointed in the number of referrals early on.

And so we did a pilot project having DC fire department paramedics answering BLS calls at certain hours during the day and the week to see if that medical training would result in additional um referrals to the nurse triage line.

And as Dr.

Holman's written testimony says, we saw um an over 700 percent increase in the number of calls that were referred to the NTL.

So I I think we have evidence that if you're making medical triage decisions in line with the advice of the medical director, you can see better outcome.

Um I also noticed in that councilmember, you did ask about this.

You asked specifically whether in the power phone system um the power phone recommended NTL and that recommend recommendation was overridden.

And I don't think that the answer to your question was um direct and and you should ask it again because there is data to show how often that recommendation is overridden.

And I think you should ask to see it specific to NTL calls and ask why those decisions are are being made.

Yes, um thank you, Chairman.

So I had um I had the luxury and pleasure of working in both types of systems, a system where they didn't require anything above EMD, and then a system that required them to either be EMT or paramedic.

Um I could tell you by far the the people who had the experience of being an EMT and paramedic um were so much more empathetic, were able to be clued into red flags, things that are you know would trigger, you know, a different question or something or a response that would say, you know, this seems unsafe or the person is in agonal respirations just by listening to the background.

Because they've they've experienced those patients in person, right?

So they've they have a lot more empathy.

The worst thing you want to do is have call takers that are robots, you know, the call taker that's just sitting there processing calls, processing calls, because they lose their attention span, they're not really uh they're they're more worried about making their managers happy and things of that nature.

So um, you know, but I have the luxury of of saying that, and I know that um I think it would be important at a minimal um if it you know, if EMT is not uh a reachable goal, like even start with like an EMR training and do some like ride, some really strong ride-along programs so that the call takers can see the experience that's happening out in the field, they can experience sick patients versus non-sick patients.

So I thank you for your fine.

Yeah, I'll I'll add like some real-time feedback from this morning.

Amotes 11 was dispatched by OUC for somebody who needed a ride to the hospital.

So then they were directed to contract contact the nurse triage line and the nurse triage line said we don't just give rides to the hospital.

So then AMLOTS 11 had to transport this person to the hospital who just needed a ride.

So I think if we're taking more time to process those calls and then you know, at the 9-1 center, they can work with the NTL line and and and figure out a way because these field referrals are just not as effective as doing it at the public safety answering point.

Um so you know, Columbia Heights is without an ambulance for however many hours because they someone needed a ride to the hospital when it could have just been an Uber or a taxi or whatever.

Okay.

Thank you for sharing that example.

Um we codified the EMD certification in the introduced version of the bill, but there's been some other discussions around other licensing agreements with DC Health or other training, and one of the pieces of feedback I heard was that emergency medical response, uh, which is more advanced training, could be an idea for us to consider expanding that we're gonna ask the director about.

Are there other clarifications or expansions that you think this bill should consider to make sure that that training component is really implemented in what your members are seeing on the ground?

Yeah.

You know, things like that to get those in.

And then also there's continuing education associated with all of these programs, right?

So if you have somebody who's not getting real-time, up-to-date EMD training, right?

Uh, and this is I I don't know right exactly how this works at OEC, but I don't know if they just take the EMD and then they never have to worry about it again, or sort of what sort of continuing education is associated with it.

Um, you know, the the executive never likes when the council legislates, right?

But you know, we need to put a framework in place, right?

And that's what really lifts it, requiring all of our members to become nationally registered EMTs, elevated the patient care across the board uh throughout the district.

So I don't know, Rob, if there's other certs that you think are out there, but um, I agree.

I think um, you know, again, set in the floor at like an EMR first responder type level is is uh really good because it identifies in that level of uh certification, it identifies life threatening conditions and how to manage life threatening conditions.

When you go out into EMT and paramedic, it gets a lot more advanced.

Um, in in the experience that I've had, uh, EMTs and paramedics that sometimes can't work in the road any longer, can make an easy transition into dispatch and use their experience there as dispatchers.

So I think that's helpful too.

And Eastern High School has an EMR program right now, and then obviously we've got that Ward 8 ATC program starting for EMT basic, which is the next level up from Soitment Pathway for district residents.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's a a win-win in that exposure.

Thank you.

Ums Barrow, one of the things you mentioned was you know, not just measuring the speed um of the call, but also the accuracy of dispatch.

Um can you talk a little bit about how else we should be evaluating performance at OUC given your experience on these issues?

Yes, um, and this also comes from our own experience.

So in 2015, when I started at the fire department, the only performance evaluation of EMS was response times, how quickly you get to the patient.

Um there was nothing about patient care, there was no following of patient outcomes.

And so transitioning to look at um the entire spectrum of EMS, which is yes, getting there quickly, but also making sure you follow medical protocols and then seeing how the patient does at the end of the treatment was really part of our success.

Um we would similarly urge that, yes, answering the call quickly, dispatching quickly, those are important.

Um, but uh as President Hoagland said, and and in my written testimony, I encourage you to listen to the publicly available radio traffic because what you will hear um all day long is um over-dispatching fire department resources, um, sending uh cardiac arrest call out, and then if you continue to listen, you'll hear that the patient is um alive and well and and able to walk to a BLS ambulance.

Um I think um in terms of what should be measured, um, you there should be measures for accuracy.

We should track when we're over dispatching, when we're under dispatching, of course, um referrals to NTL is also important, and we've already talked about that.

Um but the reason I refer to this as structural differences between the agencies is because it seems like the focus of the OUC is always time and speed.

And as soon as they're rid of the call, there's no longer responsibility there for what happens.

Um I I just uh we fundamentally disagree with that as an EMS system.

Um so those are examples of things uh that I recommend be measured and that we we did urge to be measured um throughout our tenures with the fire department.

If I could add to um the quality assurance part of this, this panel has struggled with that as we've seen when there have been incidents.

The fact that the fire department already does really good quality assurance now to look at all the factors.

They have to be involved in what's going on at OUC to be able to evaluate that.

That's how lives will be saved.

That's how patterns of mistakes will be corrected.

It's not about punishment, it's about making sure that it operates properly.

And that's why it all needs to be one cohesive unit.

They do a really good job with the reviews that they do now.

They need this element.

They the OUC, because of the TRAF War took away their even their access to listen to 911 calls.

It needs to come back.

The medical director needs to be in charge of this and make sure all is going right.

And I'll come back to you in a moment.

But let me just ask you, Mr.

Satter, because one of the things that we'll hear from the executive later today is this should be separate and they can have their own their own medical director kind of reviewing this.

What is your response to that on why two different structures, two different medical directors is not the best path forward?

If they feel they need medical direct direction inside of OUC, let it come from the medical director.

Let them provide a person if need be.

But it has to all be one unit going on.

It hasn't worked well all these years in two separate entities.

And the DC, and you just heard from Dr.

Holman, he couldn't even his recommendations for power phone were ignored.

The fact that there's still to this day, an unconscious BLS category makes no sense.

That means that they're not listening to them.

The EMS only works, it's only going to work if it's one cohesive unit and the medical director needs to be in charge of that.

Okay.

And sorry, just one more piece on this, because as we think about the review of errors, are there any other improvements that you think that should be made to this bill or in the process of a review?

Let's say this moves forward and there's one medical director to ensure that after an error occurs, hopefully in a limited way, but if they do happen, what should happen next?

I'll let the doctor speak about that, but overall transparency.

We need to we need to go into the direction of what your bill originally called for with the Secure DC Act.

We really need to get that information out to the public so they can have confidence and that they know that these errors are being corrected, what the problems were and how they're being corrected, and trying to prevent them from happening in the in the future.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Dr.

Holm.

Thank you.

We were rather proud with our experience of transparency, and as it evolved, maybe halfway through my tenure or a little before then, when we went out, we went out three different times to the homes of affected patients after a medical, a serious medical error.

We disclosed, we were transparent, we apologized.

I mean, I remember the first time I did this.

We all got hugs.

And I mean I just felt horrible as we walked in, and I felt a little better when we walked out.

But I think there's a medical literature on disclosure and apologies after medical errors that is very supportive of this approach.

I actually mentioned it to the director of OUC and encouraged her and told her I would be helping her if she wanted to ever do this.

I thought it would be very good for their team to do this.

And I think it's the sort of high-level transparency and accountability that I think needs to happen.

But please contrast that with what we've seen, people who have testified before this committee about their loved ones being mistakes at OUC, basically, and the lack of communication, no apology.

The the Shepard family waited five months before anyone even acknowledged that they sent them to the wrong address when Sheila Shepherd died of a heart attack.

It's got to change, and this is the perfect way to do it.

I commend you and the other council members for putting this bill forward.

Please don't dilute it.

I'd like to respond to the proposal of the OUC having their own medical director.

My question would be why?

Why can't you listen to the advice and direction of the medical director that you have right now?

Are you looking to hear something different?

I think when I heard the proposal, I thought it just validated everything I said in my written testimony about protecting TURF, protecting independence over everything else.

It would create a redundancy, and I think it would exacerbate some of the structural misalignment we have between the mission and the performance evaluation and quality assurance of both agencies.

And I would strongly recommend against that approach.

And welcome back to you, Mr.

Sorry.

I just wanted to circle back about three questions before.

When you're asking about what performance objectives and you know what which what should be monitored.

So there's a credit in accreditation agencies that are out there that are very successful, and they set the performance measures that need to be measured.

And they need to be measured at a at a very high rate with 90 percent, 85 to 90 percent accuracy.

Um the reason for that is though that it doesn't matter if you pick up the phone, or I pick up the phone, or they pick up the phone, customer service is going to be the same.

And these accreditation bodies hold this very strictly, and they will pull your accreditation status if you don't adhere to those standards.

I just want to let you know that that does exist and that is out there.

Um but it gives you a good uh whole format of what you should be monitoring, how you should be monitoring it.

And then like the gentleman said here, you know, the just culture and culture of safety uh environment that the fire service operates in is so important.

We don't we're not here, you know.

That's how we don't retain people, right?

Because we don't treat them well.

We instead you should, you know, if they make errors, you need to review the errors and retrain them and not just you know go right to you know rapid discipline and stuff like that.

That just doesn't work, so it's not effective.

But those accreditation bodies are they do exist and they do help you control that environment of what should be measured and how to how to help people along.

So in my work with what is called the Eagles, the uh medical directors of the 50 largest municipalities in the country, there is nobody um that talks about a 911 call center that has its independent own medical director.

They are unified with EMS.

And that's that's the standard uh throughout the country.

And I I would think that it would be very odd.

I I question the reasons why that proposal has come forth.

And that's the standard even when the 911 center is a separate agency from fire and EMS.

Yes.

Thank you.

Um Dr.

Holman, you serve as the medical director from 2016 to 2024.

And you talked about some of the improvements in the nurse triage line, um, which we we've we've discussed today, and then the dispatch system editing and quality improvement.

Can you elaborate a little bit more on those latter two on why this would lead to improvements?

Could you clarify that question a little bit about the quality improvement for the nurse triage line?

So we talked about the nursery online, but your testimony mentioned that you would expect additional improvements in the dispatch system editing and in quality improvement.

Can you just say more about why that is?

So um echoing what others have said about quality improvement, it's not punitive at all.

And so it really allows a trusting environment to understand the errors.

So there are many times we're looking at over-dispatch of resources or an inappropriate referral to this or that.

And I think having each of the call takers have an appropriate way of reviewing that, documenting those reviews, making sure they're being done, and having a medical director who knows the whole quality improvement process to make sure that it's done in the correct just culture kind of way would really help.

But there's many different metrics one can uh look at.

And it one of them would be in the cardiac arrest performance, how how well is um telecommunicators, CPR instructions being given, et cetera.

And that was being done for a long time by EMS uh paramedics in in located in the OUC, and they're no longer located there.

Thank you.

Ms.

Marr, did you have something to add there?

Oh, okay.

Um then can you talk a little bit more about the over-dispatch?

You mentioned that there were some concerns of over-dispatch of advanced life support services for basic life support calls.

And we see on the dashboard uh as of February 2026, there were 59,003 events reported, and of those 5,000 374 were ALS.

Um how is that indicative of over dispatch?

Um so I can't comment on those particular numbers.

What I can and I don't know the numbers from the last two years in terms of their performance, but one of the things that we would look at constantly would be how well are they matching uh what is needed in the field with what gets initially dispatched, and can you actually learn that from the call itself?

Um so when we move from uh a dispatch system called Pro QA to criteria-based dispatch, we had a tremendous improvement in the appropriate dispatch.

And um, you know, I left three months after PowerPoint came and there wasn't a lot of sharing of information.

So I I don't know exactly how their dispatch is matching right now, but that's something that the medical director and his or her team would really follow and focus on.

Thank you.

President Hovlin?

Yeah, I think you've probably heard us talk about this before, but whenever we're dispatched, we have our tablet and there's notes about the incident, right?

So it'll be very routine.

I'll give you an over dispatch example if this happens multiple times a week.

Uh it'll get dispatched as an infant trouble breathing, and you'll look at the notes and it'll say baby won't stop crying.

If you have medical training, you know that if a baby is crying, they're not having trouble breathing.

Because if the baby's having trouble breathing, they can't cry.

Um, or it'll there'll be another run, and then the notes will say back pain for three months, right?

Um, so these updates are getting put into the runs, but the same resources are still rolling down the road going to these incidents, and they're not, you know, downgrading them or just taking the time to just you know properly dispatch them.

Oh, over dispatching Bay LS is an age-old problem with 9-11 centers.

You can't get it right all of the time.

But increasing that percentage of getting it right serves the public well and it allows ALS to be available when it's really needed.

You really need to keep that in mind as you look forward and move forward with us.

Well, thank you all very much.

This is very instructive, um, and I appreciate all of your partnership and leadership on these important issues so we can keep keep moving in the right direction when it comes to reform and recognizing the life or death nature of of these questions and decisions, and really appreciate you all being here today and your expertise.

Thank you.

Okay, we are going to now turn to our public witnesses who are here to testify on the child support bill.

Uh Melissa McClure, Julia Ward, Johanna Schmid, Charlene Whitman Barr.

Julia Ward, Joanna.

Okay.

All right, we will begin with Melissa McClurr from Legal Aid D.C.

Good afternoon.

My name is Melissa McClure, and I am a senior staff attorney at Legal Aid DC.

I am testifying on behalf of Legal Aid regarding the restructuring of the period of enforceability for unpaid child support judgments in the proposed Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026.

Restructuring the period of enforceability makes DC's child support system fairer and easier to understand.

Under current law, every missed monthly child support payment becomes its own judgment with its own 12-year statute of limitations.

This requires parents to track potentially hundreds of separate judgments with individual expiration dates.

The proposed bill replaces this complexity with one clear rule.

Child support may be collected until five years after the youngest child turns 21.

We support this change because it ensures that child support can be collected throughout a child's upbringing, while preventing parents from remaining entangled in collections long after their children are grown.

We urge the council to make two clarifications to further strengthen this bill.

First, clarify that the new period of enforceability applies automatically as a matter of law rather than only as an affirmative defense.

As drafted, the bill requires unrepresented parents to affirmatively raise that child support judgments are outside of the period of enforceability.

If they do not, they face years of administrative and judicial enforcement of time-barred judgments.

For example, legal aid has helped clients in their 70s whose social security was garnished for children in their 40s, and only found out later that these collections were outside of the period of enforceability.

A statute of limitations operating as a matter of law also saves judicial resources by cutting unnecessary court hearings on expired deaths, while also incentivizing earlier enforcement when children are still minors.

Second, the council should clarify that child support deaths cannot be revived after the youngest child turns 26.

The goal of this act is to ensure support flows to children while they are actually children, not to resurrect deaths when they are adults.

Allowing revival of child support judgments to continue past the youngest child turning 26 undermines the Act's goal of establishing a clear and finite period of enforceability.

We appreciate that the attorney general has indicated that his team does not plan to revive debt under the new law, but we urge the council to make this clear in the legislative text.

Finally, we asked the council to consider writing off government-owed child support arrears already beyond the period of enforceability.

This would reduce judicial and administrative waste and provide relief to parents burdened by expired deaths.

We are grateful to Attorney General Schwab and his team for proposing these important reforms, and we look forward to working with OAG and the Council to strengthen this bill.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Julia Ward, Legal Aid DC.

Good afternoon, Councilmember Pinto and members of the committee.

My name is Julia Ward, and I am a senior staff attorney at Legal Aid DC.

We are proud to support the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026 and its many necessary reforms.

We are grateful to OAG for their collaboration on this bill.

We are also grateful to the committee for inviting us to share additional ideas about how to reform the child support system.

This morning, I want to highlight one such reform we recommend the automatic suspension of child support orders when an obligator is incarcerated.

We have worked collaboratively with OAG on this issue and look forward to continuing to do so as this bill proceeds through the legislative process.

First, the current landscape on this issue.

Right now, DC law requires an incarcerated obligator to affirmatively file a motion to suspend their child support order if they are incarcerated for 30 days or more.

But most people never learn about this right.

Notification is supposed to happen at sentencing, but many people are detained in DOC custody for long periods of time before sentencing.

And there's no notice for district residents who face charges in Virginia, Maryland, or elsewhere.

Even for people who do receive notice, exercising their rights is hard because in many situations, these incarcerated individuals are held hundreds of miles away from the district and our legal services providers.

Because of these gaps, orders frequently remain active, even when an obligator has zero ability to pay.

Arrears then accumulate, and the law prohibits courts from fixing those arrears later.

We routinely see this in our cases.

One of my recent clients had an order of 434 dollars a month.

He was incarcerated out of state for several years without his order being suspended, accumulating thousands in arrears.

When he was finally released from incarceration, even the bus fare he needed to get home was garnished.

Arrears like these are dangerous as they trigger additional enforcement.

Driver's license suspensions, tax intercepts, and even the threat of reincarceration for nonpayment.

Now, why automatic suspension is the best solution?

35 states already suspend or modify child support when someone is incarcerated, and 13 states do so automatically.

We propose a simple, clear rule.

If someone is incarcerated, including pretrial or civil detention for more than 15 days, their child support order should be automatically suspended during incarceration and for six months after release.

A narrow carve out would allow orders to stay in effect if, in very rare circumstances, the obligator actually has an ability to pay.

In addition to the benefits for obligors, automatic suspension is also the most efficient approach for the court and OAG, eliminating the need for case-by-case litigation and conserving critical judicial resources when our courts are understaffed.

We welcome collaboration with the council and OAG to determine how DC can implement automatic suspension to protect families from avoidable unpayable debt.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Johanna Schmidt, Legal Aid DC.

Good afternoon, Chairperson Pinto and members of the committee.

My name is Johanna Schmidt, and I'm the supervising attorney of the Consumer Law Unit at Legal Aid DC.

My unit specializes in working with low-income district residents to preserve their limited assets and wealth by, among other things, assisting those facing negative consequences of debt collection.

Today, I join my colleagues in support of the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026.

I am proud of Legal Aid's collaboration with Attorney General Schwab on consumer protection matters generally, and this bill's provisions are yet another manifestation of that long partnership.

As the council considers this bill, we believe it can be strengthened and look forward to working with OAG and the council to build upon our partnership to do so.

Specifically, I want to focus on another reform to the law that the council and OAG should consider in markup.

Specifically, the council should add to the act to create an exemption to the district's ability to suspend driver's licenses and car registrations for low-income parents who owe child support.

As detailed further in our written testimony, which will be soon submitted, we would propose that the council specifically add the following provisions to the act.

One, a definition of a low-income parent as a parent who is either receiving a means tested benefit, including Medicaid, or whose income is at or below 250% of the federal poverty line.

Two, an exemption for low-income parents from having their driver's licenses and car registration suspended.

Three, requiring the agency to confirm that a parent does not meet the definition of a low-income parent before suspending a driver's license.

And four, to provide at least 90 days' notice for a parent to comply with their child support obligation or challenge that suspension.

And five, to enable low-income parents with currently suspended licenses to challenge those upon the basis that they would now be low income.

This legislation would be critical, economically stabilizing and life-changing for low-income individuals who owe child support as well as their children.

A driver's license, as we know, is a core need for many to go about their daily lives, to go to work, to care for children, to go to appointments, and to handle emergencies.

Depriving low income individuals of their driver's licenses only sets them further back by making these tasks harder.

It does nothing to incentivize payment of money that they may not have or may not be able to get quickly enough.

Indeed, this council has historically recognized in other legislative efforts that suspending a person's driver's license and registration can have devastating impacts on their livelihoods, especially in cases in which a person must operate a motor vehicle to earn a living, making the payment of a debt impossible.

The council should now apply this thinking to child support cases as well to ensure parents are able to keep working to actually pay to support their children.

Legal AIDS clients demonstrate why this legislation is critical.

Mr.

L, for example, found out his license was suspended when he was rejected from a job because of background check showed the suspension.

He struggled to find work without a license and had been without work so long that the $98 fee to reinstate his license was burdensome.

He was not a parent who was spurred to pay his child support because of the driver's license suspension.

He was harmed by it.

We look forward to building upon our partnership with the Attorney General and the Council to include a provision along these lines for the bill.

I thank you for the opportunity to testify.

Thank you very much.

Charlene Whitman Barr, Legal Aid DC.

Good afternoon, Chairperson Pinto and members of the committee.

My name is Charlie Whitman Barr, and I'm an supervising attorney in the Family and Domestic Violence Unit at Legal Aid DC.

I'm here today in support of the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act.

At legal aid, specifically in our domestic violence practice, we've had the opportunity to work in partnership with OAG to advocate for our clients' needs where child support matters and safety intersect.

We're grateful for the collaboration we've been able to have over the years and the partnership we've built working on this bill in particular.

I'm going to speak today about some additions we're proposing to the bill.

We're very excited to collaborate with the council and with OAG to build on our existing partnership and momentum in order to expand the good cause exemptions that allow TANF recipients to opt out of child support cooperation without losing benefits.

Current law recognizes only a narrow set of good cause exemptions, primarily domestic violence cases, cases of incest or sexual assault and pending adoptions.

Those are valid reasons, but they don't come close to capturing the full reality of DC families.

If a custodial parent who receives TANF refuses or is unable to cooperate in a child support case, they'll be sanctioned 25% of their benefit.

Let me be direct about what that means in practice.

A family with two children who receives $803 a month in TANF will be sanctioned $200 for non-cooperation.

This will leave the family only $600 to cover an entire month of living expenses.

That punishment falls hardest on the children we're all trying to ensure are supported.

Custodial parents in the district often have compelling reasons for not wanting to open a support case.

The non-custodial parent may be economically unstable, and a case could deepen family conflict and harm an already fragile relationship with the co-parent and child.

The other parent may already be contributing, for example, through child care, transportation, and emotional support in ways the law does not recognize.

Opening a formal case can end those contributions overnight.

Additionally, forced litigation pulls parents away from jobs, from job searching, from caring for their children, to sit in a courthouse for a case they never wanted.

Federal law explicitly gives the authority to states to establish its own good cause bases, taking into account the best interest of the child.

The council should use that authority.

We're asking the wrong question when we demand parents prove harm before they can make decisions for their own families.

Legal Aid DC proposes the council consider two categories of change to the good cause exemptions.

First, expanding the good cause bases.

We asked the council to codify exemptions such as where forced cooperation would harm the co-parenting and parent-child relationship, and where cooperation is not in the child's best interest as determined by the parent.

Second, we urge council to codify a clearer process.

Right now, the process to obtain a good cause waiver is difficult to find, confusing once found, and only alludes to multi-agency cooperation.

In our representation of survivors and families in the district, we've seen how parents don't know or aren't explained their rights, timelines are undefined, decisions arrive without explanation.

We've had clients who qualified for exemptions, didn't know they existed, and were sanctioned anyway.

That is a failure of government, not families.

Our full list of proposed exemptions and how the process for obtaining a good cause waiver can be improved are included in our written testimony, which is coming.

Our government should work for the people it serves.

Families in the district deserve the right to make decisions about what's best for them and their children without being penalized.

We're so thankful that the council asked for additional suggestions on how to strengthen the bill.

In response, we urge the council to include these reforms in the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you all for what you do and for these important ideas.

I I want to ask you, Ms.

Ward, as we think about the automatic provision, frankly, this was part of the discussion about the draft bill.

So I'm not sure if you are aware of what happened, of what some of those hurdles are if OAG is communicated with you what those hurdles are in order to automatically suspend.

But I also wanted to ask you, and I raised this with our earlier panel too, of if that automatic piece were to move forward.

Is there any other provision to make sure that the child who was and is reliant on those payments still has what they need, even in the event that their parent is incarcerated.

Yes, thank you, Councilmember Pinto.

I I I do believe that I think everyone is understanding, I think that the district's clear intent here with the laws that are currently in place is to have incarcerated obligors receive the benefit of having their child support order suspended during incarceration.

I think what we're asking for here is to make that work and make it functional.

Um, like I mentioned, you know, we talk to clients all the time who come home from incarceration.

Sometimes they think that it was suspended, sometimes they had no idea that they needed to request it themselves.

They had no ability to do so.

Um, and so I think I think all of our partners are um in agreement that that some some changes need to be made to make this an actual practical reality for for our community.

Um I am not aware of any other type of like benefit program that would support children of incarcerated parents in lieu of the child support at the time.

Um I think it would be great if there was one.

Obviously, like our, you know, when we're talking about child support itself, we just you know, we need to make sure that incarcerated parents are not being forced to pay when they have no ability to pay.

But I agree with you that it would be wonderful if there was another um resource for um children of incarcerated parents to obtain that that monetary relief.

Thank you.

And then you mentioned in your testimony that it's very rare that uh an incarcerated parent would still have the ability to pay.

Do you have a sense of numbers on that of how often that is happening where the obligator still has another means of income during period of incarceration who has child support obligations?

I I don't have any firm ideas of that.

It's obviously you know, not really in situations that legal aid is assisting with because we're assisting individuals who who qualify for our services and are low income to begin with.

The only situations that I think I can anticipate that happening is you know, someone who's incarcerated and they have family wealth, um, maybe they have investment properties, they have some sort of like passive stream of income.

Um I don't have any idea of like how often that's happening.

I think it's fairly rare.

Um, but those are situations where we want to make sure that there is still a carve out in those rare situations that um a custodial parent would still get the benefit of child support if that were the case.

Okay, thank you.

And one of the examples that that I'm thinking of and could use folks' help in thinking through as we um move this bill forward is in the event that there is a domestic violence situation, that we don't want to be inadvertently disincentivizing a survivor from calling for law enforcement, um, if that would mean that the child support payments would automatically stop.

Um, we want to make that scenario as limited as possible, but that's just one of the circumstances that I'm thinking through, um, which then leads me to perhaps there should be another benefit available so that the child always is taken care of, um, even in the event that their parent, and that you know, that goes for all children, but that's one of the examples that I worry about.

Yeah, of course, and I I think our office would be you know very eager and willing to talk with the committee and and with yourself to to try to come up with some options in those situations.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much.

We're gonna call our next panel, Taisha Dabney, Ronald Mack, Talib Kareem Muhammad.

And if you could sit in the order that I call you, so uh Taisha Dabney, sorry.

We're gonna go in order, if that's right.

So Taisha Dabney and then Ronald Mack.

Okay.

Talib Kareem Muhammad, Ruth Wilcox, Robin Swanson.

Elizabeth Davis, Elizabeth Davis.

Okay.

All right, Edlazier, come on up.

I'll have you join this panel.

We can add a fifth chair.

Um, okay, we will begin with Taisha Daphne, Legal Aid DC.

Good afternoon.

My name is Taisha Dabney, and I'm the mother of a seven-year-old boy named Sebastian.

He's intelligent, joyful, loving, but also medically complex.

And caring for him has required me to dedicate every part of my life to his survival and well-being.

Sebastian was born with a rare tumor called a sacral coxageoteratoma.

And although the tumor was removed at four days old, the damage caused permanently like life-changing situations and circumstances for him.

Today, Sebastian has to be catheterized every two hours just to urinate.

He has to have a gravity feeding bag and catheter run through his belly button just to have bowel movements.

And without these processes every day, he can't function appropriately.

He can't feel or move his left foot.

His left leg is significantly shorter than his right and deals with muscle atrophy, which all affect his mobility.

He also suffers from cyclic vomiting syndrome.

And when those episodes happen, they come without warning and cause severe pain and vomiting that can last for days.

And although he technically qualifies for a home health aid, home health aids don't have the specialized medical training to perform the care he needs throughout the day.

Because of Sebastian's care since birth, I had to leave my career as an auditor with Marriott International and have not been able to maintain employment.

The only way I've been able to care for my son is through his SSI, his child support and tannin.

And so when money meant to go to Sebastian is taken and given back to the government, it creates an even greater hardship for families like mine.

Children with severe medical needs or any child should not lose the support meant for them simply because their parents had to rely on a safety net while caring for them.

So I'm here today because families like mine need that support to remain where it belongs.

It's not a luxury, it's not an extra benefit.

It's a necessity.

And it allows Sebastian to live.

That money should stay with the children.

It was meant to help.

Thank you for your time and listening to our reality.

Thank you very much for being here and sharing your story.

Appreciate that.

Ronald Mack, Legal Aid DC.

Good afternoon.

I'd like to give honor to the committee, Pittman, and to uh the staff and child support.

I mean, child, I mean legal aid, I like to give honor to them for in supporting of me and what I've been through.

I want to say that I am here to support the bill to surpass, to pass uh the improvement in the amendment act.

So I am in support of the bill.

I just want to say that uh what they were saying earlier about uh suspension of the uh driver's license.

I had a driver's license revoked and suspended, and I was in concentrated, and I've been paying child support since the late 80s, and just got off child support because a legal aid helped me.

I didn't know where to go, who to turn to, and my kids was grown, and I was still paying child support through the system, and the government made interest off the money because I added it all up, I was through with it, but they just kept getting money, kept kept getting money.

It's like I was in prison.

So that kind of hurt me.

I got frustrated.

I had an active driver's license.

They evoked it.

I couldn't go back and get it back, or if I did, I had to go take the test, and my eyes weren't too good.

So uh I never got that back, so I gotta go through the system try to get it.

I still ain't got it back when I when I had it, it was acted.

But they revoked it and took it away.

So I went back, I couldn't pass the eye test.

But uh I'm sorry that things sometimes the way that they are, but you got some people who wants to take care of their children, they want to do right by their family, you know, and sometimes people fall down on hard times, you know, and we can't help that situation sometimes occur the way that they do.

And so we try to deal with it, you know.

Everybody's not fortunate.

You know, some people have jobs, some don't.

Some people try to do what they can, and uh me hearing a lot of cases on violence and things going on with it, is is it is said, but there got to be some changes with that system.

So I want to say that I'm here to support the bill that y'all were passing bill to uh help a lot of other people like me that's gonna come behind me and that's gonna suffer hardship because I suffer hardship for many years, and uh I'm 65 years of age, and I should have been with through with child support years ago, and it's been almost 39 years that I've been on the system, you know, paying to the system, and the kids is grown on their own, doing well and doing good.

And uh I'm 65 years of age, and I should have been with through with child support years ago, and it's been almost 39 years that I've been on the system.

You know, paying to the system, and the kids is grown on their own, doing well and doing good.

And I just want to say I'm supportive of the bill, but sometimes you gotta help people.

I would like to get my license back, but I can't pass debt tests.

But I had a life, it was active.

They just took it, messed it all up, and the system then I just can't get it back with my advisors.

So I just want to say I'm a supporter of the bill, and I want to thank Liga Aid and all the councils and all the staff, Miss Brooks and Judith Wars and uh and all the rest of I don't get your name right, you know.

I just want to thank you for really being a help to me because I looked everywhere, couldn't get nobody to support me, and I thank God for putting Liga Aid here today to help people like me and other people who's not fortunate, okay?

Thank you.

You know, and with that I want to say pause up, okay?

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Robin Swanson, managing attorney impact litigation and advocacy, volunteer legal advocates.

Good afternoon, Chairperson Pinto and members of the committee staff.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act of 2026.

My name is Robin Swanson.

I'm a managing attorney with Volunteer Legal Advocates, formerly the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project.

We know that child support systems can be designed to better support children and families while also improving parental engagement.

Across the country, policymakers are moving towards more holistic, family-centered approaches.

Approaches that address the root causes of non-payment, ensure children directly benefit from support, and strengthen co-parenting relationships.

This bill would move the district in that direction by revore reforming how child support payments are distributed to families who currently receive or previously receive TANF.

Under current law, low-income families often do not receive the full amount of child support paid on their behalf because as a condition of receiving TANF, they must assign those payments to the district.

As a result, families see only a fraction of the support intended for their children.

Passing these funds directly through to custodial parents would make a meaningful difference.

For the families we serve, even modest additional support can help cover groceries, medication, utilities, and housing.

It can be the difference between stability and going without.

The current system also discourages families from pursuing child support in the first place in some instances.

Many of our clients treat child support as a bargaining tool in custody or protection order cases, sometimes agreeing to lower payments because they know they will not receive most of what is eventually collected.

This undermines the core purpose of the child support system, ensuring that children receive consistent support from both parents.

Research shows that parents are more willing and able to pay when they know their contributions go directly to their children and not to reimburse the government.

This legislation would shift the district away from a cost recovery model and toward a family-centered one.

It would require the district to pass through state-assigned child support arrears to families who receive TANF, ensuring that children benefit from the full amount collected on their behalf.

It would also extend the enforceability of child support orders until the youngest child turns 26, giving families more time to collect unpaid support while also providing a clear endpoint for parents.

We also support additional reforms mentioned by legal aid that would strengthen the bill, particularly expanding the goods good cause exemption for TANF recipients who are survivors of domestic violence.

For many survivors, TANF is a critical lifeline, but the child support cooperation requirement can create real safety risks, deterring survivors from seeking assistance or exposing them to further harm.

Expanding and simplifying the good cause exemption would allow survivors to prioritize their safety without losing essential support for their children.

It's a practical trauma-informed step that aligns with a truly family-centered approach.

This bill's an important step toward a child support system that puts children first.

It ensures that support reaches the families.

It is intended to help.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you very much.

Elizabeth Davis.

Public goodness.

Every day in my practice, I watch hardworking parents make impossible calculations.

They consider the price of a new medication that could help control their child's asthma, acknowledging that paying for it out of pocket will leave less money for food and rent.

They weigh the extra income, a second job would provide their family against the cost of the additional child care they would consequently need to secure.

Most of the kids I take care of receive aid from programs like WIC, SNAP, or TANF, and many live in single parent households.

These programs offer a helpful step towards making ends meet, but many parents share with me they still worry about providing for their children's basic needs.

The Child Support Improvement Amendment Act would provide vital assistance for families receiving TANF.

By assuring that custodial parents obtain the complete sum of child support payments they are due, the amendment would better equip low-income parents to provide for their children.

This could be a lifeline for single parents who feel like they are barely getting by.

The amendment would also help non-custodial parents to feel confident that their hard-earned support payments are going directly to help their children during the critical periods of physical and emotional development occurring in youth.

By passing the amendment, DC would be taking a step towards guaranteeing that all its children have the resources to grow and thrive.

The children families of the district deserve policies that strengthen their livelihoods, helping them navigate a path towards stability and success.

Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today, and I respectfully request a favorable report on the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you, Dr.

Davis.

And if you all wouldn't mind just scooching over a little bit, we're gonna hear from Ed Lazier next.

Thank you for for physically squeezing in.

Yes.

Um go ahead, Mr.

Lizier.

Pick that up at the end.

Thank you.

Uh thank you so much, uh, Chairperson Pinto for allowing me to testify on uh on behalf of the CEO of United Planning Organization, Andrea Thomas, who's not able to be here today.

And uh UPO it was founded in 1962 and has been working for the last 60 years to provide a multiple of services to improve the economic security of DC residents.

And we're here today sharing uh the frustration and the decades long call for justice that parents who have not been getting uh child support are calling for, and that parents who have had non-custodial parents who have had debt hanging over their head long after their children are raised are also calling for.

We're an organization committed to reducing poverty and supporting economic mobility, and we know that child support can make a big difference.

Families that live on TANF have to survive on incredibly modest incomes.

And when they start to work, they quickly face a benefits, Cliff where other benefits, TANF and other benefits fall out.

Child support can help ensure that families have enough resources and that all the families' resources are there to support children and can help that path to self-sufficiency be eased for parents who when they go to work.

Beyond that, we just think it's simply outrageous that much of the child support paid on behalf of our lowest income families never gets to them.

To that end, we support the following changes reflected in the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act, including immediately allowing $200 in monthly child support payment to pass through to custodial parents, whether it's for current or uh awards or arrears, adopting a policy to pass through 100% of child support to custodial parents again for current awards or arrears, knowing that that might take at least a few years as the OAG upgrades its computer system.

We want to also ensure that any child support passed through to families is fully disregarded for TANF eligibility and benefit determination.

Beyond that, we share the recommendations that you've heard today for amending and improving the legislation, both in the interest of custodial and non-custodial parents, starting with tax refunds being intercepted and going directly to families first rather than to government first, suspending child support orders during any period of incarceration and for some period after release, stopping the suspension of driver's licenses of low-income parents who have child support arrears, forgiving all child support debts automatically once a family's youngest child reaches a certain age, uh 26, I believe, is the recommendation that's been considered, and expanding the reasons that a parent can seek a waiver of the TANF cooperation requirement.

Um we're just eager to see this legislation passed.

We we've known about this injustice for years and have been incredibly frustrated by it, as you've heard today and are just eager to see this resolved and are super thankful that Attorney General Schwab, that you, Chairperson Pinto, um have taken the lead to and legal aid have taken the lead to move us forward and bring us to this point.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Um and thank you all for being here and for sharing your stories and and for also all your work on these issues.

Um I want to ask you, Mr.

Mack, as you talk about, I think you said you were paying for 39 years.

Well did I hear that correctly?

What what is the right the age you think should be the cutoff for a child in determining the calculations?

Maybe you could turn your microphone on.

I think A should be cut off.

Uh I could be wrong.

I don't know.

I could be right.

I know I've been hearing y'all talking about 26.

Uh I could say, well, by me being older, you know, when I came up in life dealing with my parents and stuff, you know, I was working like when I was like 20 or 21.

But I guess they stepped it up five or six more years because uh the kids have an opportunity to to go to college, you know, and the parents and the parents will have to, if they separated divorce, the father will have to contribute to that college fund.

But what we have to look at, all that's good and true, but you got some people who don't have that kind of money.

Everybody's not don't have that kind of money to support the kids.

You got some parents that can support the kids because the mother had money, father had money.

But what about people that come up in the hood, come up in the property neighborhood that don't have that, you know, have a heart to understand that want to do for their kids.

I love my kids.

They grown.

I wanted to do for them.

I wanted to do things.

People had can have conditions, people have problems.

And in this world, you're gonna have problems, the rich, poor, no matter what they is.

But I I I wouldn't say what age they should, they should be cut off because the government makes their laws, you know.

They people, the powers that be makes the laws, you know, see.

But I would say, try to, when you make laws, try to let everybody live, you know, and try to have understanding.

Everybody's not wealthy.

Everybody ain't come up with a silver spoon.

I didn't come up with a silver spoon, you know.

My I have to say this for true.

My father got out and work, he was an alcoholic.

My mother was a mother at home.

She struggled, she dead and gone, they've been dead over 40 some years, you know.

See, so, and all my family is is dead and gone.

I'm the last one left.

My mother had 13 children.

All of them dead.

I'm the last one left, me and my sister in Texas, okay.

And so I I fell on hard times, okay.

You know, I I got out there, I ain't gonna lie, I'm ashamed to tell you before everybody here.

I got out there, I got an addiction, I got into all that stuff, you know.

But God cleaned my life up and turned my life around.

You know, it was hell, you know.

And I was hurt too.

I was feeling anguish too about child support when she took me to court, got on the system, and my life came a shipwreck.

But right now, God is just putting my life back together.

I give him the honor and the glory, you know, because he bought me from a hella full horrible pit, you know.

I would like to have a driver's license day.

I would like for D to send me a letter and say I ain't gotta take nothing.

Give me my license back, you know.

But the powers that be, they took it, they make the laws, and uh people struggling out here, and it's gonna people gonna be struggling when I'm dead and gone, you know.

But I just say sometimes you gotta be reasonable.

You can't look at it and say, Well, he should have been like I was, he should have had this.

Everybody ain't should have had got anything.

People just had problems, you know.

But I just want to say, support, yes, pass the bill, but make it where people can live.

People fall on hard times, you know.

I'm speaking from the streets, my my life, you know, and I know what God did for me.

He brought me back from a hell of a pit I was in, okay?

Because some people can't come back from addiction, some people get self-annihilated, disjarded, okay.

I went through that depression and all that in child support.

Got a everything I touched, they got the gunner, she got to do this.

I was in prison.

They it didn't stop, it just kept piling up, you know, just kept piling up.

And I got out there to build and double and did this entrance on, it's just nobody lives but just a certain class of people.

You gotta let people live, you know.

So if this bill is gonna help people to get them where they're going, pass it, you know.

But you know, we want things to help people, you know, and and and listen to her testimony and my heart watch to you for your child, okay?

Because I don't want to see nobody's child suffer like that, you know.

But your child is in God's hand, okay?

God got it, you know, God got everything.

So it's just that it's just the way the system is, and you know, it said, but uh, you know, I'm uh I'll be 66 next month, you know.

I wish I get a birthday gift and get a letter, say, come get your license, you know, because I go down, I can't see in that thing and see 2020.

My ass mess up, you know.

So I learned from my mistakes, okay?

To try to be a better person, and my kids just grown now and they they're doing better than me, you know.

So I'm glad for them, you know.

But I'm just I'm here today, and you know, I I I didn't want to come down because I don't know how to speak between this community board.

I'm just saying well from my heart, you know.

But you know, I have it be, I just say, God be with me, you know, in the battle.

That's all I can say.

Like Joshua, you know, Moses did, you know.

So I'm just here and I'm just speaking, and I just want to say legal aid, I want to thank you all.

Y'all are great help.

Y'all are great help because I couldn't get nobody to help me.

And I thank God for having y'all here to help people.

So that bill needs to be passed, what they asking for, because they so helped me they they could have turned me away, you know.

I was really kind of nervous because they told me, say, man, look, we like we ain't guaranteed to take this case, but like in two weeks or 30 days you were here from us.

And I want to, I don't get all y'all named right because I'm not as smart as y'all is, but I want to say thank you because you had to be smart because God and y'all won my case, and my case came a came a reckoning while it's whatever it is, it's fixed.

They got me off, and I want to thank God for you.

I want to say that to all you all, you know.

I can't get all your leaders, your names right, but thank you all for being a help to me, okay.

All the lawyers and everybody.

Liga A need to stay in business.

They need that money, they need that bill because they need it.

Because it's gonna be people when I'm dead and gone, gonna need legal aid, okay.

So pass that bill.

The money is there, give it to them.

You know, listen, have a humble loving heart.

If I was rich and like the rent out here high, and somebody can't afford 3,000 a month for bed, look, man, let people live.

So I want to say pass that bill, and the language that I can put it, you know, I'm just being wrong because I don't want to go with me reading the paper.

I want to speak from the heart.

Let people live, pass the bill, give it to them, keep them here because everybody can't afford a lawyer.

Everybody don't have that cat.

Everybody ain't living out in Montgomery County.

Everybody ain't driving the bit me when they walk out the bill, maybe it's from here.

I'm not.

You know, so I'm just being real, you know.

So pass that bill, where it can help many other poor folks, you know.

Because people out there struggling, let me tell you something.

And I'll and I'm gonna be quiet in this now.

I ain't trying to talk y'all to death.

Listen, God loves us all.

He gave the earth to us humans.

And you know why we messed up in the government in the world today?

Because of greed.

I'm gonna live and you're gonna die.

No, everybody should live.

It's coming out me now.

If we let everybody live, it's gonna be all right.

And that's what it's about.

Consider other people.

Wealth ain't gonna get you with God when you leave here.

It's what I did to help somebody.

That's what it's about.

Giving.

So give something to that bill, pass it, and let it come through to help people.

And and and I'm old enough to be her father, and she got kids.

And I thank God that he let me live to see this day.

I got a birthday coming up.

I'd be 66.

My help ain't the best help, but I thank God for bringing me where I'm at today.

I say, Lord, I don't know why they called me to come down here.

They called the wrong one.

But God got me here, okay?

And I just want to say pass that bill, because I was over there.

I didn't know what to say.

I said, Lord, I don't I don't know what to say.

You speak for me.

But I just want to say pass that bill, help these people, because there's gonna be some people coming after me, okay.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, Mary.

God bless you all, okay.

For being here and for sharing your story, and and that's how we make the best policy possible.

It is you speaking from the heart and it's not a good thing.

I just speak for my heart, and I don't speak for what's you know how I should what I should say.

I just like to keep it real.

I'm I'm a realist, I'm real.

I came up in hard life.

Caught the bus, caught the train.

Hey, man, let me buy 50 cents.

I can't, you know, help me out.

I didn't come up rich.

I didn't come up with like all them rich folks.

Private this private debt, you know.

Well, thank you.

I know we appreciate you being here, sir.

And we'd also be happy to follow up with you about some of your DMV license issues to see how we can be helpful.

I wish I could get something to say, come get your life, don't go through this, because I had my life.

I've been driving for years.

They took mine.

Then they say, Oh, go get it back when I get it back.

You gotta go through the test, man.

My eyes are I just had cataract on my okay, sir.

I'm I am gonna have to move on now.

Um, but I really appreciate you being here and your testimony, and thank you all very much.

Um, we are concluded with our public witnesses for today's bills.

Um, we're gonna turn to our government witnesses first here to testify for the Ease Act, ensuring access and supporting engagement for DOC Residence Act of 2025.

I'm gonna invite Leonard K.

Johnson, the deputy director for the Department of Corrections, and Katarina Seminova, special counsel for the public defender service.

Um, up to testify.

Thank you both for being here.

And deputy director, we're gonna begin with you.

Um, but before I'm gonna swear you both in.

So once we got our microphones all suited up.

Come on.

All right.

So if you could both um turn your microphones on and raise your right hand, as you know, it's our tradition to swear in all government witnesses who appear before it.

Do you swear or affirm under penalty of law that the testimony you're about to provide before this committee and the council of the District of Columbia is the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Yes.

Thank you.

Um, Deputy Director, I'll turn to you first for any opening statement you may have.

Deputy Director, I'm sorry, could you turn your microphone on, please?

There we go.

Go ahead.

Yeah, you can start again.

Good afternoon, uh Chairman Pinto, members of the committee and staff.

My name is Lenard Johnson.

I serve as the Deputy Director of Operations for the District of Columbia Department of Corrections.

I am submitting this testimony today on behalf of Director Tom Faust and the DOC team of public safety professionals.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony today on the ensuring access and supporting engagement Ease Act 2025.

As Deputy Director of Operation oversee daily security operations, housing management, staffing allocations, movement control, and safety systems throughout the central detention facility and the correctional treatment facility, which house male and female pretrial and sentence residents for perspective of our population during the physical year 2025.

The average total population was 1978, 1,978.

And in the first quarter, FY26 through the end of February, the average total jail population was 2109 spiking at a one-day high of 2203.

As currently written, the Ease Act will require DLC to provide all residents with access devices and internet access to register for any and all council hearings, submit testimony, and testify live.

While DLC supports meaningful civic participation and engagement, several provisions of this legislation pose substantial safety security infrastructure and operational risks that cannot be safely and feasibly implemented in our correctional setting.

First and foremost, introduction, introducing open and expanded internet functionality in the correctional environment, create significant risk, including unauthorized communications, attempts to bypass network monitoring systems, coordination of criminal activity, and exposure to digital contraband.

DLC educational entertainment tablets are intentionally restricted to prevent these risks, and expanding connectivity is neither uh secure nor feasible.

DLC facilities do not currently have the secure bandwidth, uh monitored Wi-Fi systems or technical infrastructure necessary to support real-time virtual testimony.

Previous communications to the council have noted DLC's challenges with connectivity, technical limitations and staffing, implementing the live video testimony and vision in the bill would require secure room construction, dedicated movement coordination, full-time correctional staff, uh supervision during testimony, and expanded technical support, all of which exceeds uh DOC's uh current operational capacity.

Each resident uh testimony session would require screening, escort movement, supervision, and secure uh return to housing.

These movements require correctional officers to be removed from mandatory security posts and reassigned to oversee this function with limited resources and operational demand, such as medical movement, court transports, programming, visitation, recreation.

DOC cannot support additional required movement without compromising facility safety and stability.

Further, there are serious concerns about how this process will undermine safety protocols around the movement of inmates with varying custody levels, minimum, medium, maximum, as well as mandated court and facility ordered inmate separations.

In addition to movement and infrastructure concerns, the bill also mandates administrative responsibilities, including developing educational materials, facilitating multiple communication pathways, managing no cost mail processes, and preparing annual and quarterly reporting.

These responsibilities significantly increase workload for case management, program administration, and operations staff, diverting attention from core safety functions.

Residents currently have a duly elected advisory neighborhood commissioner who represents their entrance and serves as liaison to the council.

The ANC works along with designated DLC staff members in executing their duties and responsibilities and maintains a dedicated office with phone, email access, with phone and email access, established facility protocols, allow the ANC to post messages, memos, letters, flyers on both the entertainment VIP path and the educational tablets to connect with the MA population at both facilities.

The ANC participates in monthly MA Grievance Advisory Committee meetings, which bring together staff from across, which bring together staff from across facilities along with resident representatives from all housing units to discuss facility concerns and solutions.

Meetings happen once per month at the CTF and CDF.

With the ANC, the ANC Town Hall meetings are also held on a monthly basis at both facilities, with the ANC having the opportunity to communicate with residents and learn firsthand about issues and concerns they have.

The ANC is the empowered, is empowered to document findings and recommended solutions forward to agency management for follow-up in action.

The DOC ANC Commissioner is supported by a self selected board of residents who work collaboratively with him to identify issues and concerns at both DLC facilities and recommend viable solutions to problems identified.

This board of individuals, according to the DOC ANC Commissioner, has demonstrated the ability to communicate effectively on behalf of their peers.

The current DLC ANC Commissioner reports, I cannot speak for those for more than 2,200 residents on my own.

This board plays a major role in gathering feedback, identifying concerns, and reporting the needs and concerns of resident population.

This existing representation model allows for resident prospectus to be conveyed without requiring expanded internet access, additional movement, or increased security exposure.

Additionally, residents are also able to respond to counsel on proposed legislation via written communication by letters directly to counsel, giving letters to the DOC ANC or to their attorneys who can provide the letters to counsel on their behalf.

The DLC supports democratic engagement and respects the importance of allowing individuals in our custody to have their voices heard.

However, the Ease Act, as written, requires Internet expansion, supervision, and operational changes that create serious security risks and directly undermine essential correctional functions.

This bill is not operationally safe, not feasible, and not compatible with secure correctional practices.

For these reasons, DLC firmly opposes the Ease Bill and urges the council not to move forward with this legislation.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on behalf of the DC Department of Corrections.

Thank you, Deputy Director.

Ms.

Seminova.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

I'm Caterina Seminova, Special Counsel to the Director on Policy and Legislation at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify at this hearing, and I will be testifying on the Child Support Improvement Act and the Ease Act.

PDS strongly supports both the Child Support Improvement Act and the ensuring access and supporting engagement for DOC Residents Act of 2005.

Sorry, 2006, beginning with the Child Support Improvement Amendment Act.

By way of background, PDS's civil division represents PDS clients in child custody, child support, housing, special education, and other civil matters that arise from or are related to their criminal legal system involvement.

PDS supports the councils and the attorney general's efforts to reform child support collections for families receiving TANF and to reform child support arrears collection.

Families receiving TANF are by definition extremely poor.

Funds that go to families that receive TANF significantly improve outcomes for those families and reap economic benefits for communities many times over.

In order to access TANF, recipients must assign all rights to child support to the District of Columbia.

Under the current statutory regime, only $200 a month of any child support received by the district is passed through the family.

The remainder of any child support payments stays with the district to fund child support collection or is directed to the Federal Treasury and does not reach the impoverished children it was meant to support.

The Child Support Improvement Act would improve would remove this cap and allow all child support collected on behalf of families who receive TANF to go directly to families.

PDF supports this effort.

The Child Support Improvement Act also reforms the period of enforceability on support orders by having the period of enforcement expire when the youngest child turns 26.

This is a practical reform that replaces the current 12-year limitations.

Working with non-custodial parents at PDS, we have seen that child support debt can be an unbearable weight around the neck of low-income people for decades.

The debt places people in a cycle of poverty where the debt inhibits employment prospects, while the lack of employment prospects prevents individuals from paying down the debt.

Reforming the enforceability people period and allowing for finality will help both custodial and non-custodial parents support their children and maintain financial stability.

These two reforms are excellent steps in the right direction.

There are additional changes that would further improve the district child support system, and that the council should adopt as well.

First and most importantly, the council should add automatic suspension of child support orders for incarcerated individuals to this bill.

Maryland and California have already undertaken these reforms and automatically suspend child support payments and stop arrears during incarceration.

Current DC law allows an incarcerated parent to move the court to suspend a child support order.

Nonetheless, child support orders often remain in place during lengthy periods of incarceration.

DC code requires judges to inform defendants at sentencing of their right to have a child support order modified.

In practice, not all judges inform defendants of this right, but even when judges do provide this information to defendants, incarcerated individuals are not always in a position to act on it.

At the conclusion of a criminal case, individuals are typically focused on their sentence and the appeal, not their child support payments.

And the defendant is represented by a criminal defense attorney rather than a civil practitioner.

Shortly after their sentencing hearing, an individual serving time on a felony sentence is transferred to the Bureau of Prisons, where they will have essentially no access to a lawyer.

If they are under disciplinary sanctions or suicide watch, they may have no ability to contact anyone at all.

Further, there is no required judicial notice regarding child support modification for individuals who are held pretrial, which in serious cases can last years.

Because federal law prohibits retroactively suspending support orders, incarcerated non-custodial parents can incrue months or years of arrears.

As the Congressional Research Service noted, large arrearages can block work opportunities for non-custodial parents because past due child support obligations are reported to credit agencies, which provide the information upon request to employers.

This negative impact on credit can also harm a returning citizen's ability to find housing or secure a vehicle, further impeding employment.

Returning citizens are faced with these barriers and the disadvantage of having a criminal record.

Automatically suspending orders during incarceration and for 180 days after release would support re-entry rather than further burdening individuals in a difficult yet pivotal moment in their lives.

PDS also supports additional changes to child support collections, including decreasing criminal sanctions.

Failure to chat to pay child support can lead to a criminal contempt conviction, which carries up to 180 days in jail.

This time period should be substantially decreased to allow for a maximum of 15 days or no incarceration at all.

Eliminating automatic driver's license suspensions.

Under current district law, driver's licenses are suspended automatically for non-custodial parents who have two months of unpaid child support.

There should not be automatic suspensions for non-custodial parents who are receiving a means tested public benefit or whose income is below the self-support reserve.

With respect to arrears, legislation should stop enforcement after the statute of limitations rather than requiring the noncustodial parent to raise this defense.

Our written testimony has further details and provides language.

Turning to the EASE Act, the EASE Act provides DOC residents with the opportunity to fully participate in the democratic process during their incarceration.

Not only does it expand opportunities for participation by DC residents, the EASE Act helps the council receive the most accurate information for oversight hearings and legislation concerning the DOC.

DOC residents are the experts on jail conditions, medical care, programming, and education.

It is essential that the council hear directly from them when it legislates on these matters and during budget and oversight.

Providing testimony and fully engaging in the democratic process by watching hearings fosters re-entry for detained residents and strengthens their connections to the community.

Many DOC residents are parents and have family members that are impacted by any number of issues that the council tackles, such as school and child care budgets, housing scarcity, the availability of health and mental health care services.

Providing oral or written testimony allows DC residents who happen to be detained in a DOC facility at the time of the hearing to still take part in our democracy, have a voice in government, and have an impact in the community.

As explained by an incarcerated resident in Washington State who advocated for a bill that would allow testimony from prison, being able to testify adds meaning and person and purpose to a person's life, and it allows incarcerated residents to be a part of something bigger.

He described that the process acknowledges your humanity.

Engagement in the legislative process also builds on the work already being done in some of the most impactful programs in DOC, such as the Young Men Emerging Program and the College Programs by advancing education about the at about advocacy and government.

Further, the council's need to hear from incarcerated residents is clear.

In 2024, the council had a hearing on a bill that would establish standards for pregnancy and childbirth for residents of DOC.

Two women who had delivered babies while in DOC custody were not able to testify over Zoom at that hearing, and instead, lawyers read their prepared remarks.

Council members were not able to ask questions and hear directly from these women about their experiences.

In 2023, this committee held a hearing on fresh starts, a bill that would mandate nutrition standards at the Department of Corrections.

Again, the council was not able to hear in real time from incarcerated residents and ask questions about the most pressing nutritional needs at the jail.

Every year, this committee spends dozens of hours on budget and oversight hearings for the DOC without ever hearing directly from residents about solitary confinement, physical safety, food safety, medical care, or programming.

While advocates do their best to convey information from DOC residents, DOC res and DOC residents can submit testimony in writing if they learn of the hearing dates and are able to access writing supplies.

There is no substitute for live testimony and dialogue between council members and the residents that can take place at hearings.

In Washington State, which has facilitated hearing participation by incarcerated people, one state senator described resident testimony as enormously powerful, adding there's no substitute from hearing from somebody directly impacted by a policy.

The senator said the testimony just made your head explode.

Similarly, in Massachusetts, the testimony of incarcerated people has helped provide information on solitary confinement being disguised as restrictive housing, the impact of limited family visits, and the need for programming.

In addition to being necessary, testimony by incarcerated residents is now achievable.

The Ease Act capitalizes on technological advances at the Department of Corrections where the use of tablets is now widespread.

Further, the council's new hearing management system also allows residents to submit testimony even if they do not have access to letter writing materials and with the delay that comes with mailing.

In addition to supporting the legislation, PDS recommends adding several provisions that will strengthen the Ease Act and that will also protect incarcerated residents.

Rather than leaving an open-ended implementation time frame for the DOC, the council should set a maximum three-month deadline for DOC's compliance.

Further, the legislation should specify that residents are always allowed to submit testimony anonymously without a camera, such that only committee staff have the witnesses identifying information.

Finally, the EZEC should include a provision that allows attorneys to be present when a resident gives testimony to the council.

And the ESAC should specify within the education materials that residents that it should encourage residents to discuss testimony with their attorneys.

Suggested language for both of these bills is included in our full testimony.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you both for being here.

Sorry, I just got something in my eye.

And your your testimony.

How do residents of DCGL get where they need to go now?

If somebody needs to meet with a lawyer or leave for a court hearing date, or has some other need to move around the facility?

DC Department Correction is 100% escorted movement.

Escort, sorry?

100% escorted movement.

So they're escorted by a correctional officer wherever they need to go.

And how do you manage that on a day where there might be a lot of movement going on?

We have escort officers, and so we'll manage medical attorney visits.

You know, you have things that may come up, such as hospital escort that wasn't scheduled that may come up.

So we'll manage as best we can with that.

Okay.

And Ms.

Sami Nova, what's your experience in with dealing with clients who are being escorted to move around the facility or to leave the facility?

So there this clients did not used to have to be escorted for all visits.

For example, clients used to be able to have a pass to go to the visitation area for legal visits.

And they would be given a pass, they would walk to the visitation area and then they would return.

So that there have been time periods, including under Director Fast, where there was more non-escorted movement.

But there is escorted movement, for example, for education as DOC mentioned for education, for programming.

There's a there's a level of activities that happen within DOC and all of those are supported by DOC.

Okay.

And so how do you anticipate that the allowance of testifying hearings would change that system or would it operate within the current structure?

I think it requires buy-in and cooperation from DOC.

If they they have to embrace this not only as a programming function as a part of participation as a part of democracy, the same way that they facilitate other programming within DOC.

So prioritizing it, permitting it, embracing it as something that is a district value that should be embodied within the district's detention facilities.

And so the same way that it does other movement, it would do movement for this.

Creatively thinking about this issue will create solutions as well.

Further, testimony does not occur at the here in this chamber on a daily or even weekly basis.

And so there's a season when this happens, there's a schedule, there's an ability to plan for for hearings through the notice requirement.

So there's there's there's plenty of ways to make this happen with um cooperation.

And deputy director, how do you currently make it happen with the ANC commissioners who are authorized to testify?

DNC commission as he testified.

Uh there's an office on his housing unit that has a computer and it has access that only he has access to.

So that's how he's able to testify.

That uh does not exist in any other housing unit?

Uh that was specially made for the ANC commissioner from the first ANC commission.

Okay.

And so there, like for today's hearing, for instance, there are a couple of DOC residents who signed up to testify or who wanted to testify.

How would that have worked?

Would would it be an option, for instance, just to allow them to use the ANC commissioners device in order to access us?

It's not a device.

It's a desktop computer.

And so could they use that desktop computer?

No, because on that board and you had some female residents that testify today that would not be going to the male housing unit.

Okay.

And so what about other screens that they those women use to access their lawyers?

Those are dedicated specifically to attorneys.

We have some is CDF.

It's about five told.

I think five are CTF and two at C five to CDF2 at CTF.

And they are dedicated to the court system, the legal system, and that's the volume that we have as it pertains to those.

And where are those located?

One's in the visiting hall at CDF.

There's three, two in the visiting hall, and two in the CMP area, CDF.

One at CTF, two was located, one in the vision hall.

They have two in a visiting hall at CTF.

Okay.

And so is there a functionality barrier with using those screens that people use to access their lawyer to just be able to dial into a council hearing?

Yeah, so the tablets are all on a secure network.

So they cannot access social media, public internet, those sort of things.

For example, trying to reach out to a victim, right?

Witnesses.

So they cannot access those platforms.

The areas that you're speaking of for the court?

That's all day, generally Monday through Friday, uh averaging probably about 205 a day on average between CDF and per facility, CDF and CTF.

So currently, if a resident is using technology to speak with their family or to speak with their lawyer, what is the role of staff in observing those visits?

I'll use the example of the court, because we're speaking about that.

There are staff that escorts them.

There are staff that are present that have to work that post.

It's not just left to, it's not unattended.

So it's it's a manned post, so two different functions.

Someone has to pick them up and escort them, then someone else will be staying there, uh, making sure uh nothing goes wrong with the technology, making sure there's no damage, which we've had, which we have had.

So we have staff members that are there uh for safety and security.

And under this bill, it could operate similarly, right?

That there would be staff who escorts folks where they need to go and observe to ensure that there's no misuse of technology or communication with the victim or a witness?

Yeah, I believe in part of our testimony, we would need additional staff, additional infrastructure for additional units in order to do that.

How many additional staff do you think you would need?

I would have to get back with you on that.

We're speaking of potentially our count today is around 2100.

So as written, all 2100 people, if they wanted to, would have the right and the ability to testify.

Escorting 2100 people for a hearing would be a monumental uh task.

Yeah.

I mean we could make that argument for the population as a whole that 700,000 people, if they wanted to have the right, or more than that, really, the whole population of the world has the right to testify at our hearings right now, but we don't have that in practice.

Um even today, when you know this was put out as a opportunity that people wanted to testify, there were still only a couple of people who you know will submit written testimony and who had testimony through their ANC commissioner.

So I I do think it is important to write these bills with understanding of what would happen if that extreme and unusual scenario happened where every single resident signed up to testify, but we don't see that in any population of a hundred percent uptick or utilization of that right.

So I don't know why we would see it here.

Um platform do you use or do residents use in order to do their legal visits?

Is it Zoom?

Is it WebEx?

Need something else?

I don't know to specific uh platform that they use.

Okay.

Because I'm just thinking of to your point of not wanting to make sure people don't contact their victim, which I think is an important goal.

Um that need still exists currently under, but we still have provision for people to be able to use a platform in order to speak to their lawyer or their family.

So it would seem that it would probably be the same platform.

So if you're speaking of the platform that they're using for the tablet, that's a restricted platform.

So it's respect, it's restricted to it it doesn't have outside of that platform access as a bypass system, and they cannot communicate outside of that approved areas that they can go to.

So families, text, but they're monitored.

Right?

So it's not an the point I'm trying to stress, it's not an open uh platform like an open web platform.

But this wouldn't be either, right?

This would just be similarly specified for a narrow use in order to provide testimony in the exact same ways that you're articulating are currently allowable, just be one expanded use, right?

It's possible.

Um I believe that as was stated also in the testimony that there would need to be some infrastructure upgrades for the Wi-Fi capabilities.

We have Wi-Fi capability currently, but adding more uh to that, we're gonna need to upgrade to Wi-Fi as well.

But that's what I'm trying to understand.

If if I imagine there has to be Wi-Fi capability in order to contact your family or a lawyer under the current system that you use, right?

Under the current system for tablets, no, it's restricted.

Under the current system that we spoke about for that's dedicated to the attorneys.

It's not attorneys, dedicated for the court.

Yes, they're able to access on that.

And that's limited to five stations.

Five stations of CDF, two stations as CTF.

And is there usually a long wait list to access those screens?

It's averaging about 25 or so per day.

So 25 people or 25 minutes.

25 people average.

22 average C DF, about 30 average CTF.

Okay.

Um the capability exists, right?

To use Wi-Fi to connect with people outside of the facility.

The capability exists, as you know, the uh ANC was on today, is very, very limited and very, very restricted.

So it's very limited.

It's not capability, it's capability in the areas that we spoke about for legal counsel, which is a priority for us, the courts for the court system, uh, which is a priority to make sure that they're seen.

So to expand upon that would require uh resources to expand that.

Okay.

I guess as I think about the Wi-Fi functionality, several years ago, DOC came to us and said we need additional funding to have better more improved Wi-Fi, as did PDS, and we provided for that funding in the budget.

Um the Wi-Fi functionality, even if only a limited few stations.

I hear you on the tablet distinction, but it does exist.

And so this would just be expanding one use of what is permissible.

Um, there were some security concerns.

But this what what are those security concerns?

We spoke about contacting unauthorized communication with victims and witnesses sharing sensitive facility information, misuse of live video platforms.

It provide operational strain to our current resources, again, in terms of escorting people to the area where they need to be in order to testify.

Let me just ask you about that.

So over the last year, how many cases of misuse has there been of technology while someone was using the Wi-Fi to contact their lawyer or a family member?

I can't speak to that right now.

Are you aware of any?

I'm not certain.

Okay.

So because I I understand why that would be a broad concern, but if I don't know why this functionality would create a deeper risk for any misuse if we're not currently seeing that with the already permissible uses of Wi-Fi and of contact.

I mean, of course, there would have to be, you know, rules around what is permissible as there currently are and other things around that uh risk includes system bypassing, unauthorized communication, criminal coordination, a digital contraband, and contact with prohibited individuals, which we spoke about.

DLC, uh effective mitigation requires additional staff, IT specialists, real-time monitoring, hardware upgrades, analytic systems, uh the DLC does not currently have.

So let's ask you something specific up there, then I'll turn to Ms.

Seminova.

When someone goes in to use one of these screens, and let's say they're going to contact their family.

Who physically logs on to the to the system and dials into that contact?

An officer.

An officer.

Okay.

So the inmate doesn't touch any of the technology.

And officer login among.

Okay.

And so if we were to expand one use of that permissible technology, wouldn't it be the same thing that the officer who's supervising physically logs in and nobody who's serving a sentence would be touching the system?

I think when we're speaking about those one stations that are dedicated to the courts.

Okay.

I guess I'm not speaking of adding new hardware because it would just be through I mean, we use Zoom here, but you know, if that wasn't secure for some reason, we can't.

No, I'm speaking of the stations themselves.

We have stations that are currently dedicated for the courts.

So to not use those for the courts, and we talked about the numbers right now, pretty much averaging per day.

If we then take that system and say, no, we're not going to use that for the courts.

Now there's going to be a backlog with the courts.

So really more hardware would be needed.

I see for the current needs of the court communications.

For the court communication, and speaking of the proposed bill.

Thank you.

Oh, I miss Seminova.

Go ahead.

So if it's done through a platform like WebEx, which is what the court uses, then it's a direct link, and it could this bill does not envision having free access to the internet and text messaging and it it envisions a way to directly communicate with the council, which is satisfied by a secure link where then the participant is in the meeting and can participate in the meeting.

And so it it's not, it seems strange to say that there are all these other uses that it can't be a single stream that goes right into this meeting.

But even if it isn't if there is an issue with escorting, or not an issue, but escorting has to be done, it would still be to a single secure device that connects into something that is essentially like a court hearing.

This is also what BOP uses for court hearings.