Well, welcome everybody.
We're glad you're all here. Hopefully, Jeff was just telling us that the parking was not Utah County's fault.
So don't complain to Utah County about the parking. This parking lot is only half a mile away.
I know.
Bob, can I correct you? It wasn't the attorney's fault.
Right, yes. Yeah, yeah. So if we could do roll call. Maybe just Tyson, just go around the room starting with you.
Tyson Skeen with the Utah Prosecution Council. Rob VanDyke, Kane County Attorney. Eric Clark, Washington County Attorney. Brett Robbins, Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office.
Brad Noble, Cedar City Attorney's Office.
Ed Montgomery, South Jordan. Steven Foote, Duchesne County Attorney. Jeff Gray, Utah County Attorney.
Jeff Buhman, SWAP, not on the council. Dan Burton, Attorney General's Office.
Karen Walker, Provo City Attorney's Office.
Bob Church, UPC.
Ron Weight, UPC. Marilyn Lawson, UPC. Okay. Review the minutes from the previous meeting. I move to approve. Second.
Bob, I'll second. You need a second? I'll second.
Bob, the 24 budget review closeout.
Yeah, so you've got our closeout or the final budget. You know, if anybody has any questions, I'm happy to answer those. We carried over $150,000. I thought it would be just a little bit less than that, but it was right at $150,000. So that puts us pretty good for next year. Remember that we did have to give $90,000 back, that whole issue. But anyway, if anybody has any questions on the closeout of the budget. Yeah, any questions there? Just because we had such a healthy carryover this year, as you can see, what I'm proposing, and this budget has that built in, I can add it back in, is for our DUI and DV boot camps and our visual trial skills. Since those are smaller, it's kind of outside the training, normal training curriculum. We understand that training budgets for offices, some of the smaller ones, can be tight. We're proposing that we don't charge the $125 registration fee for those courses, but then charge the normal fee for every other course. So that's the only thing that is different from the budget that I proposed in April. And so if you want to discuss that, we're going to continue to pay the lodging for the students at BASIC. There was just that one or two years that we didn't, but we paid for it this year. We're planning on paying for it next year. That's factored into the budget as well. So that's really the only substantial change from the proposed budget in April. And then, just so you're aware, is we have applied for an $8,000 mini-grant through our national organization. It's funded by NHTSA to help defray the cost of the DUI boot camp. Originally, we had planned on holding that just at College Drive. But if we can get this mini-grant, we're looking at possibly going to Logan or someplace off the Wasatch Front and then use that mini-grant to help defray the hotel costs.
And we didn't approve this last time you used it.
Correct. Yeah, we needed approval.
Salute.
Dan? Okay, Dan and Rob, thank you. Dan? Okay. An update on our personnel. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. Thank you.
All in favor? Aye. Opposed?
Thank you. Okay. Let's see. Okay. So, moving on to personnel. So, I'm not sure. Tyson, are you in Teams?
I'm not.
Okay. Well, I'm just not monitoring if there's a chat. Let me see what we've got going on in the chat. Oh, sorry. Yes, so Marilyn, Stuart, and Sam both voted in the affirmative. Thanks, Stuart and Sam. I didn't catch that. Yeah, Stuart. Oh, yes, sorry. I thought Stuart Williams and Samantha Smith are online. Okay. So, we did hire a secretary, Emma Johnson, a recent college graduate, young, 23. Not that that really made a difference or factored into our decision, but she's super eager, really smart, has just been going like gangbusters, has been to, came up to BASIC and assisted. She has been to one of our other conferences to observe, is doing a great job. She is interested in the legal profession. I understand she's studying for the LSAT. And her, for those of you that knew Nathan Evershed, know Nathan Evershed, she is his niece. So, she has, and again, not that that, we didn't find that until after the interview, but she's been doing a really great job. She'd be here today, but she's out of town with her family, so. Well, once again, I'm going to go to the legislature this next year. I'm in the process of completing, there's a series of 10 questions that our personnel office asked me that I fill out to provide to the, is it G-O-M-B-P, whatever that acronym is?
Yeah, the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget.
PB, Planning and Budget.
Budget Planning, one of those two.
One of those two. They plan and they budget. Yeah, they budget and they plan. So, I'm in the process of filling that out. I don't think I did one last year, other than just make the request for the DV Resource Prosecutor, if you recall. We're trying to divide Trent. Also, Trent is in Memphis, Tennessee, training. Otherwise, he would be here, but we're wanting to divide him because right now, I'd say, probably 80 to 90% of his time is spent doing the trauma-informed sexual assault training. And he's not intentionally neglecting the DV portion of it. It's just the reality of all of the statutorily mandated sexual assault training we have to do. We're not getting as much DV done. So, last year, I think, really all I did was ask and make a petition. I'm grateful that I'm able to fill out this questionnaire because I'm loading it down with facts. I've been working with Utah, the Domestic Violence Coalition, and they provided me some updated research on statistics showing number of cases that were filed compared to the number of cases that were reported. And there's like a 15% to 20% difference in cases that are reported to this national database of domestic violence versus the lower number that are actually prosecuted. And so, what I'm doing with this memo is just pointing out the need and hoping that this is true that if we had somebody who was dedicated to DV and was a resource prosecutor that they could go, and this is probably going to be primarily in the cities that do a lot of that, but help with motion work, maybe even second chair trials, be a resource, help develop expert witnesses. I know Donna and Marlise, after her, were trying to develop a pool of expert witnesses that could testify in domestic violence cases. But, again, just because of their time, they couldn't develop that and certainly not off the Wasatch Front. And so that would be another thing. And so I'm hoping that this year maybe armed with a little bit more actual data, we can convince the legislature to fund this position full time. You recall that at one point they were going to give me funds for one year and it just wasn't going to work. So I'm hoping that this year we can convince them to give us ongoing funds. And so if we do that, we can be the first prosecutor for domestic violence. The AG's office has been really gracious. They're holding an office open for us up on the third floor where we're at and right now we just filled it up with swag. But if we hire somebody, we'll get rid of that and hire somebody.
Do we have a legislative champion for this at all yet?
Not really. That's something else I wanted to talk to you about. I know Lieutenant Governor is big on that, but I don't know if that's really something you want to talk about. So maybe you and I can talk.
And if there's anyone here who's got a good relationship with their legislator, that's also useful, especially if they're in EOCJ, that appropriations subcommittee, that would be helpful. So Burton helped us out with the SWAT piece. He might be interested. He's close to leadership as well in relation to me.
Senator Stevenson might be in a different way or something.
But we should talk to them probably in the next few weeks so we don't get too deep into things. This doesn't seem like it would be very hard to lift.
Yeah, I hope not. Do you get a sense of is this going to be a better year, a not so lean year? I don't know.
Every year is a bad year. Stop asking for money.
I know, right? Okay. So that's all I have on personnel.
Training committee. We just finished up BASIC again. A group of 18 very eager, very highly motivated, smart people. It's a tremendous course. The rest of the training stuff is in the materials if you want to take a look. Visual trial skills is an ongoing thing that I see in there. It's a very worthwhile course. You talked about an advanced trial skills course. Logistically, it's a little bit difficult. What's your sense on that?
Well, this is going to be the last year that we're sponsoring a civil conference. And so there has been talk that one is that UPAA is talking about wanting to slide into the slot where civil conference has always been in the fall. But that would still mean that, especially now with Emma, who is eager to help out with conferences, that we could start seriously looking at another two nights or a day and a half or two and a half days doing an advanced skills course. What my wish list in hiring Emma for the position is that she could help out with some of the smaller boot camps or the visual trials and so alleviate some of those responsibilities from Maryland for having to do all of the busy work associated with that so that a bigger conference like an advanced trial skills Maryland would have time for. And so that's kind of my end goal. And so what I would suggest is if the training committee, if the council would like us to see on our 25, maybe even to 26, schedule creating an advanced trial skills course, the training committee meets next month and that's something that we could talk about, that we could plan, that we could put on the agenda. I know this last year with the visual trial skills, that was kind of a compromise as we said there were so many that wanted to learn how to use the visual and trial work that that would take the place of our advanced trial skills. But I have heard and we get feedback, especially from our prosecutors that are in the five to eight year that still remember how good basic was and are looking for, just are hungry for more advanced skills. So I think that if there is a desire in years past, probably not so much, but I think now that there would be enough of a desire and students that could come to that, that we could probably look at putting that, logistically putting that on our calendar.
How much extra time do you guys have? I know last time we met we were talking about 13 different events throughout the year and you guys are stretched to the limit. I mean can we realistically add more? Do you guys have enough resources to do what you need to do?
And Marilyn can chime in, I mean she has been watching Emma, is if, I mean this is something we would have to transition her into. I don't know, she is certainly not ready to be negotiating contracts and things like that. That is what I am saying is some of these smaller courses that we do at College Drive that Emma could take charge of that where there is no hotels, or minimal, we get a hotel for Blair, our instructor. But do you think we could transition another year where she could take over some of that and we could add another conference?
I think once she gets the funding for that, time management.
And right now, she's half to three-quarter time is what we have her, so she's non-benefited. And we decided to do that just to see if we could keep her, you know, busy full-time. And I think she would like it if she could go full-time and certainly be benefited. And if that happened, part of that would be because we would increase her responsibilities. A thought that I just had, I haven't even said this out loud, I'm just thinking out loud, is there's an events management, I can't remember course, I can't remember exactly what the name is, that perhaps we could look at having her go and getting some training on. So there are some options where, given time and experience, we could increase her responsibilities.
Do we have staff for that, to increase her training schedule?
Well, that's what I'm saying.
It's not really an increase, right, since you're dropping Sybil.
Yeah, yeah, it would be a trade-off. Yeah, it would be a trade-off. Because I know there are those in the Sybil side that would like us to pick Sybil back up. That's a whole other philosophical discussion that we've had in the past. But I would prefer to see us pick up an advanced trial skills. So right now, I think, as Emma progresses, I think we have the personnel. To Rob's point, yes, we have the personnel. But I would just like to see Emma take on some increased responsibilities.
And if she were to go full-time, I could see her easily.
So we'll put that on the training committee's agendas, talk about an advanced trial skills. And we've talked about it enough, and just so the council is aware, and this was Tyson's idea, is we could take out some of the DUI and other canine demonstration, that we do at BASIC, and we could just rebrand BASIC, change the fact pattern, make it a felony fact pattern, and do some maybe DNA and forensic issues and things like that. But the essential skills, we could just wash and rinse and repeat BASIC, and just call it advanced, and meet that need.
I had a conversation about that again with Blair Bartle. Last week, we did a visual trials course, and we were going to lunch during our break. He was talking about this very thing. And this is Blair's quote, is he says, there's not a prosecutor in the state that couldn't attend BASIC prosecutor and not leave becoming a better prosecutor, no matter how long they've been there. And his statement was, if you went to BASIC today as a prosecutor and didn't get better, that says more about you than it does the course. So that's one of our non-UPC employees who helped us with BASIC. That's his perspective.
Yeah, we just need to adjust it, because we're not going to ask, well, unless that's what the council wants, to do a five-day advanced trial skills. I mean, we certainly could, but we would want to, so we would pare that down.
We'd have to adjust the agenda a little bit, but the principles, whether you're a day one attorney or you've been on the job 30 years, good trial practice is still good trial practice.
Yeah, the National College of District Attorneys used to offer that course. That was 10 or 15 years. I went to it, and I found it as a mid-level prosecutor to be very valuable.
My perspective is we've had people with six months' experience. We've had people with 30 years' experience. Every single one of them benefited substantially.
Oh, are you talking about this last BASIC?
The last two.
Yeah.
And you'd be surprised how my impression would be that any, virtually any attorney that hasn't gone through a course like we've done or like BASIC would learn tremendously.
Yeah, yeah. We just have to get over that some of the senior prosecutors say, well, I don't want to do homework. I don't want to be filmed. But that's what this course would be about.
We could get rid of filming. That one is like a concession, right? We could get rid of some of the presentations like you said. I think we could use the same fact pattern, just take the DUI out of it. We could just do the DV because it is a felony DV.
Yeah, that's true.
And roll with it. Yeah, do it somewhere nice. That'd be an enticement.
Do it where? Somewhere nice, yeah.
Bryce Canyon or something.
I do think that it would be important that we have experienced faculty. That was one of our concerns a few years ago when we were really planning on doing this. And we looked at the faculty, and it was like me and Marlise, and I think the world, myself, obviously. You guys don't have my ego. But especially Marlise. But there was a certain cachet that probably didn't come along with a couple of misdemeanor prosecutors coming in and teaching all you really great felony prosecutors how to be trial attorneys, right? People in this room, I don't think that'd be a problem. But we know that's a problem across the state. There's an ego that goes along in our profession. So having somebody with name recognition or years doing felony work, I think, would be beneficial. But we're starting to get that back on our basic prosecutor faculty anyways. Right.
And that's what we've been looking at with our train-the-trainer courses. We had some students that came through this last time that have that 12 to 15, you know, a little bit more experience that weren't able to be on our faculty this year for basic just because of scheduling and other things, but that we could incorporate into a more advanced, you know, for an advanced trial skill. So we're feeling better about our faculty, our pool of faculty.
We use two new faculty members.
Yeah. So I haven't writing letters to the bosses. Oh, no, I did send you a thank you. Yeah. Yeah, Jeff did great. Tony Graff. That's not even close to Jeff Gray. Tony Graff.
Jeff Gray's great as well.
Jeff Gray's awesome. He just wasn't on faculty.
Tony Graff, I'm sure, is great.
Yeah. So it was great. Ed came back. Phenomenal.
When I did basic, he was on faculty, and you were great.
Okay. Yeah. So, okay. Thanks, Ed.
E-prosecutor.
Ron.
Okay, so we've been doing testing on e-fighting, and it's gone pretty well. The only problem we've had with testing e-fighting is, of course, we'll monitor their test system. And so when we had an issue, we couldn't get a response back on what the issue was very well for sometimes a couple weeks. But it went really well, and it looks like it's proven the concept that it's going to work. So we're going to move it in this month. We're going to start moving it into production. And I've worked with JTI, and they talk about having just one office do it to start with, and Washington City is going to start with the production because they have experience already doing it in Washington County. The main assistant there and one of the prosecutors were working with Washington County and were doing e-fighting, so they're familiar with what it works, what the issues are. They'll get started, and as soon as they've done enough that we're confident, I'll start moving. I mean, I'm going to have some counties and cities that have worked with us to help do some of the testing will be moved into it. And what I'll do is we'll move one or two at a time into production using e-fighting, and once we've got those going, we'll move a couple more and a couple more. I just didn't want to move everybody all at once because it would be overwhelming if we had any issues, which we will have a few. Courts have proven that e-fighting isn't perfect until you work out some of the wrinkles that you have to do. I mean, sometimes the wrinkles are that they don't have attorneys listed in their filing system that we have that should be in there, but they don't yet. We have to get that fixed. There's some issues with matching up statutes, which we've worked really hard on the last couple of years. Thanks to Tyson for all the work he's done to help us get there. We've kind of coordinated with the courts a lot, so there should be a lot less trouble with the statutes. So, yeah, we're moving into e-fighting. You can do more than just information. You can start a case, but with the courts, and they send back and save the court number and the judge in our system and tell us it's there and ready to go, and then we can also file additional documents. So I don't know what all the additional ones are, but there's a box where you can file after the information. You can continue to file documents and stuff with the courts, so it won't be just information. And there's some training and stuff that needs to be done for that, and we may have to do some work on our templates. For example, some of our templates have motion and order in one document. It has to be in two separate ones to file with the courts. So that's some of the work I'm trying to get started on in the background. I'll work with each individual agency to make sure we get that going. But it looks like it will be coming. I mean, it will be coming the end of this month, the first of October we'll be getting started with it in production and then just move it forward from there as soon as we get a few of the wrinkles out and make sure the courts are functioning on their end. So, yeah, it looks like we're ready to go. Also, we just brought on a new county. Rich County is now with the prosecutor, too. It's a small county, but it's just one more that helps us get better data. We're also working on a better data collection process with CCJJ. I'm working with them almost every week. I meet with one of their data guys, and we talk about getting data to them and everything. So that's going pretty good, pretty smoothly. Right now I'm submitting all the reports for anybody using our version of e-prosecutor. I submit the reports to CCJJ for you so you don't have to worry about that. Going forward, that's the plan.
Did you need the volunteers still?
No. In talking with JTI, we had some volunteers, and I'm going to work with them next. We'll get Washington City, we'll start. And then as soon as they're working smoothly, then I'll move it to several others as quickly as I can. It might depend on how the court's responding. If there's issues with the filing that come up or not, then that'll depend on how... I just don't know how fast we can move it. Yeah, we'll be moving it into anybody who wants it as soon as we can. There'll be a smooth progression, one or two or three a week, a month. We'll be moved into it depending on how smooth it goes.
Jeff, are we getting everybody the information they need on e-prosecuting? I haven't heard any feedback at CCJJ, but I think their expectations are low. So I haven't heard any feedback. Rob, did I give you anything? I don't know.
But we're also not really using our own data for anything useful.
We're not. Yeah, that is the other thing. If you need to use your data, I can find a way that you can get it. I just need to know what you need and what it needs to look like. You can do a search that'll get you a report that'll get you the data you need for your office, too.
We need to just remember that, right? Like as the legislative session comes, or even during the legislative session, you know, if some issue comes up, it's like, well, maybe we can pull data for that.
Well, there is a statewide legislative committee that is supposed to be fixing a lot of these issues with the availability of data. They started with basically police agencies. They've made a lot of progress, and they're talking about prosecutors now. But I've told them many times until there's funding to bring us all into one system, there's really not a good way to do this. They have some ideas. Basically, you build an access point for any system. Like Utah County owns something, a file line. We're working on a file line ourselves very much. So everybody can push into a common data port. It's an API. But that's still a ways away. My wish was everyone was on prosecutors. Well, that's largely because our data is much smaller than the data they want, which is mostly prison and jails. Well, they do want prosecutor data. Right, but it's a small portion of the data that's out there. But it would be nice if we could see each other's data. But we're nowhere close to that.
Is there anything we need to do?
Well, I would argue that we should all be on the same system. I agree with that. We left Aussie prosecutors, in my understanding. We did. And there's money. I mean, frankly, I think if Utah County wanted to come back, I think we could maybe get money. I don't know.
That's the impression I'm getting, at least from my grant manager at CCJJ. He's saying, what's it going to take? And I said, probably just a whole lot of money. But, I mean, there's a whole other issue that maybe this isn't the place to talk about that the AG's office has made us aware of, is if an agency contains sensitive data like tax information, that there are those that are arguing that e-prosecuting, general technology,
Like I said, that's something that's just...
You've got to go do what they call FedRAMP certification, right, and get certified to use federal data to be able to see it. That's just a process.
Yeah, but I'm leaving that up to general technologies. I'm not getting involved in that. We would love it, I would love it if UPC got out of the case management business. However, financially, we have benefited because as part of the grant that we receive, it pays for 60 to 70% of whatever percentage Ron works on it, is we get grant funds for that. Plus, you all pay the user fees that helps us, and so if we got out of it, that's going to take a huge hit to our budget, but we can address that at some future point. What I forgot to include in here is I have applied for grant funding for next year, and again, my grant manager doesn't see any reason why it would not be approved. It's essentially the same grant application, just updating the data that's been approved the last three or four years, so we should know by the end of the month, maybe mid-October, if that has been awarded, so I'll keep you all posted.
What percentage of prosecutor offices are currently used?
Right now we have, I forget the breakdown between counties and cities, but there's 44 agencies, counties and cities using prosecutors through UPC, and 265 users.
What is Salt Lake more than that?
I don't know what Salt Lake is, but Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County are probably bigger than that, just by themselves.
Are they on e-prosecutors?
They're on a different version, they're on their own version.
The back end is the same, so if you wanted data from it, it would be easy to get the same data from them as we do from us.
So the counties, I know Utah County is on it, are you on it now?
It's the big counties, Davis, Weber, Utah. Yeah, Davis hasn't been used.
Davis and Weber are on their own system, and Washington County is on their own. Uintah has a different one. Uintah and Tooele have a different one.
Carpell, they have Carpell.
And I'm not averse to exploring the possibility, I mean, I haven't been completely happy with Filevine, but I might have a riot within my office.
The change is hard.
And that's what I've told CCJJ, in answer to your question earlier, is what's it going to take? As I said, a lot of money and a lot of convincing of the offices of switching over and learning a new system.
Well, and ultimately it's not CCJJ's driving it, it's going to be the legislature's. If we could all get on the same page, we'd have to go past CCJJ and say, here's the reason why and here's how much it would cost. The problem is I don't think we are all on the same page, and I think that's the bottleneck. And it would be, what, several million dollars?
Oh, yeah.
Maybe five million dollars, right? I don't know that they'd impose to it, but they'd also want to know there's unanimity amongst the prosecutors.
Well, and it's like this, what's it called, FedRAMP.
Certificate, yeah.
If that truly is an issue and if it's as big as an issue that some are concerned about, I mean, we have to take that into consideration. But, yeah, it's expensive because data conversion is almost as expensive, if not more.
Data conversion from one system to another is very expensive, too.
But you don't have to convert your data.
No, you don't.
You just have to maintain your old system.
Correct.
I have had a couple of legislators ask me what it would take to get all the prosecutors on the side. I did say it would take a mandate. I was just talking numbers, but I said if you even funded 50 percent for the big offices to move on and mandated data data, maybe that would be enough.
Part of the problem is they don't have any driving reason to do it right now, right? Last time we talked about this was when BLM was a big thing and they were looking for data after we were arrested. No one's talking about it right now, so they don't care, right? Even once it happens, then they'll care.
Well, the data committee is still. They're out there. It's kind of petered off a little bit this year. I think we lost a couple of our champions, Handeregg and someone else. So it's not quite the project we want.
The reality, though, is that if you have good data coming from cops, police agencies, and good data coming from the courts, what data do they need from us? You know what I mean?
Well, they do like to know what we do and don't file and why. What we do and don't plea bargain and why. A lot of that is not susceptible to data.
If you have really robust data, police agencies are saying what they're forwarding.
You're saying you can infer what's going on in the middle.
They may not be super interested in us anyway.
There's a lot that requires us to report certain things, though. So there's a lot that requires prosecutors to report certain information. But they're right. It really hasn't done anything. But they haven't done anything with it. I remember when Ron sent his first report in, CCJJ was like, what are we supposed to do with this?
And isn't that essentially still the case?
He's like, I don't know. The dog got the car and didn't know what to do.
They're gathering all the data and putting it in. They're designing some type of a database to hold the data from different systems. But that's still a work in progress. Theoretically, what they're working on is where they could get to it and they could do a query on this statewide database of prosecutor and other than law enforcement courts data. And you could see what happened with any case you wanted across the state, all the way from arrest to through adjudication and through probation, whatever, just by querying that one system. But we're a long ways away from that. But that's what they want to get to when they're working to get there.
Once a legislature figures out how to look at our data to reduce state costs, then they'll care about it. They're looking at the prison to reduce state costs.
It doesn't sound like it's much of an issue for us. We're there now. We just go forward the best we can.
But we do have to get better at being able to access the data that we do have because that could be useful in various issues that we're trying to push on the legislative side. I know that's not a UBC thing, right?
No, but Ron can pull all that data easily.
We can pull it from...
Data that's in the system.
Yeah, that's the problem.
We can't pull it from big offices.
We can't get it from the bigger offices. It would be very helpful because I admit I make up a lot of data when I testify. I was just going to say, let me pause that. It's true, but I probably said this is what we're estimating. I don't say a lot because a lot of them I just can't give them data. Data would be useful. We're just not there.
Is that some low-hanging fruit? Especially these offices that are using e-prosecutor, just not under UBC e-prosecutor. Isn't it like a couple buttons for them to send the reports to us? I don't know how much...
It would be, Ron, wouldn't it?
Those that are using e-prosecutor could get reports the same we're doing and we could share that data pretty easily. If they wanted to.
That wouldn't help me. Usually what I need are distinct queries. What's going on with this type of offense? Who's the prosecutor? We're not. Why? The general data we send to CCJJ is probably not...
I've always been curious why they want that particular data to tell you the truth.
It's because they start off with a list like this and Dan and I and Carlson got it paired down to this and ones that we thought we could actually provide with more or less a data query.
We couldn't get them off. It's Ryan Wilcox. He's got on to school safety. That's who it was. He was driving this. Yeah, and it was also the one from Provo, Andrew, wasn't it? No.
Judkins.
Judkins, yeah. But just a quick note. If local offices want some data from e-prosecutor to help them understand how they're doing their work and what's happening in their office with prosecution and charges and offenses and stuff, please get with me and we'll figure out how we can get that to you because you're putting the data that would help you manage your office better. I'm more than happy to make that part of our product to help you put the searches in that query so it gives you that data, but I just don't understand what you need.
How difficult is it to... So the question I have is if I just have raw data to look at, that's not necessarily super useful. It's like taking that raw data and getting it to a report that shows, oh, here's our DUI numbers over time and here's our DUI numbers over time. So how do you get from a query to a digestible report? That's probably work that I would have to do.
Yeah, well, you can get the data from the system and then massage it however you need to to get percentages and numbers for whatever range you need and it exports it to Excel and you can use Excel to do all kinds of stuff with it.
But is that something you can help the individual offices?
I could help with it if it gets to work. If I'm spending 99% of my time building reports and we've got a problem, but I don't think it'd be that hard. Because getting the data into a spreadsheet is the hardest part and then just run a few functions to drill down stuff that's more helpful to managers.
Jeff, with e-prosecure, you can even just put in the code section and it'll pull up every single active report the office has ever charged if it's there. So that is really helpful. And there are plenty of reports that we didn't have built yet and they can help you build the reports to get the information. As long as it's a new prosecutor, they can find ways to get a report.
I hadn't thought about that. Would Salt Lake be willing to share some of those report templates with everybody else that's using it?
I don't see why we wouldn't. We'd be happy to do that.
It's just beyond my expertise. You can export a search or a query to a file, share that file, and I can import it into our system and massage it. There's some slight configuration differences, but I don't think back end is the same. I think we'd be able to figure it out.
And Lisa's not your programmer, right? Lisa Ashnow, she's just the project administrator.
Right, but she knows who, if we need something to go to her, then she gets the report. Right.
UPA?
We have now two positions. We just heard Jaycia, that was with the GA's office, has resigned. She got a job elsewhere. And Kaylee Christensen resigned earlier this year. So we have two positions that we need to fill. And I think we're going to work on sending out an announcement about that. And so if there's anybody within your office you would recommend we're taking those.
Are you looking for a city person, a county person, it doesn't matter?
I don't know that it matters right now.
Didn't the ORM folks, new ORM people, express interest, willingness to serve?
Well, they attended the conference for the first time ever. Yeah. So we'll reach out to them and see if they want to become more involved.
Maybe I was told when I was at the city, I mean it's been a while, I thought they had mentioned that they might be willing to serve. Maybe reach out and ask them.
Okay. How many prosecutors are there in the state?
Oh, that's a fluid number. What I reported to DOJ as part of John R. Justice is about 521. That includes the AG's office, their special prosecution includes all the counties and then cities. So it may not be quite that high, but it's probably, I would say 450 for sure, 450 to 500.
And we have 2-300 appearing at spring conference. So we're reaching a lot of, I guess more than I would expect.
Yeah, yeah.
I laughed because that's the number Bob's been trying to get, but people aren't very cooperative in getting the information.
Well, and that's another thing that Emma has been able to do for us is, you know, we had that new statutory requirement a couple years ago to maintain the contact list of everybody. So we had Kathy Locker from the DA's office that initially gathered that, but Emma this year was the one that updated it, and then I had her. She was calling your offices, finding out how many prosecutors we have just to keep track of that.
Resource prosecute. I'm the only one here. Trenton, Memphis. Yeah, my report, you know, you probably look at my report each time you come here and say this looks pretty much the same as it did last time because I use the same format and everything, and it does look the same. A couple things to point out. Bob mentioned we're ready to roll on DUI boot camp. We've got it scheduled for January, and depending on what we find out next week on the grant, I'm actually on the committee that reviews those grant applications. They may ask me to step out of the virtual room when they discuss our application. I don't know if they'll make me do that or not, but we have a meeting Monday to determine who gets those grant awards. So we should know next week, and that will determine where we're at. If we don't get the grant, we'll just do it in Murray at Coles Drive. If we do get the grant, we'll go somewhere else, and it should be a great course.
I think it's going to be a really good course for newer prosecutors learning how to prosecute DUIs specifically. One thing I'll point out is I'm on pace to do over 900 requests for assistance this grant year, which ends the end of this month, is the end of my grant cycle because I'm on the federal fiscal year, which would be a record. And if you start doing the math on that, when there's 365 days a year, but I don't work 365 days a year, so when you start taking weekends off and holidays and vacations, and you start seeing how many requests I'm getting every single day on average, that's high. My training numbers are down a little bit this year because I didn't, one week I was gone for legislative updates. So when we came to your county, it was your leg, nobody else is here. I was actually in Michigan for a conference for my TSRP stuff, so I wasn't on that. So my numbers are a little bit down because of that. That's a pretty good chunk. When you miss a week of legislative update, that's a pretty good chunk of training and time. Otherwise, everything else is on par, but those requests for assistance are always high. But yeah, if I hit just even a low average month this month, I will go over 900 requests for assistance this grant year. So things are really busy. It's good. I'm glad people utilize me. I'd rather be busy than sitting on my duff in my office waiting for something to come in. So it's pretty good.
How long is it going to be until you're too busy? I think maybe you're too busy right now.
So I hesitate to say I'm too busy. I'm busy. But to some extent, I control this, right? I can tell somebody, no, I'm not going to come do that training, or I'm going to have to get back to you next week on this, or whatever else. So I have the ability to manage this. And I think I was talking to you. I don't know if I was talking to you or not. Where I had gotten to the point where I felt like I had gotten a pretty good balance on things, and then this spring I got out of balance again. But that was a Tyson issue, right? And it's just you learn and you grow and try to be better. So next year there might be things that come around in the spring where I say, sorry, I can't do that right now. Where last year I was very open to taking on extra projects, and we did train-the-trainer during that time, which always is a lot of work, right? So I wouldn't say I'm too busy. There's certainly work. I mean, if there were three of you, you could come up with work, right?
Tyson, you said 900 requests? Yes. I can't imagine those are all equal in value. Can you give me a picture of what those are like? Because I imagine some of those you can say, go call your boss and they can help you out with this. Others only use the software.
Some of them are as quick as somebody sending me a text message. So how I track this is anything that's not sent to me via e-mail. Like if you call me and ask me something, I'll send myself an e-mail. Dan Burton called me today and asked me about this legislative issue on this DUI law. That's a request for assistance, right? And then I just, like you can see that here. I've got, by year, every single one. So you want to see them? They're all there, right, in my e-mail. And I probably don't track all of them, to be honest. That's how I track them. It can be something as simple as some of the conversations we've had where you've called me and be like, hey, Tyson, let's deal with this, to other things where I spend weeks working with a prosecutor on an issue, researching, helping come up with arguments, and then anything in between, right? And so, no, they are not all equal. Some of them are very, very quick. Some of them are not.
The reason I ask is if we're going to help you, right, how do we triage and identify if we need to hire someone new or is it just adding something to the basics course so they know what kind of things they can take care of? Or is it a frequently asked questions page that they can go to, right, figuring out what kind of things you're dealing with, help us just determine what kind of solution to it?
And I don't even know that I share that as a problem. I think that's more just a highlight of Utah prosecutors and other people because it's not even all prosecutors, right? I work with a lot of different entities now. They recognize the value that EPC has, and they're using us. I mean, that's good. It's more of a highlight than an issue of a problem. I mean, it is busy. But that's my job. I'm a resource prosecutor, right? That's what I do.
We want you to go fishing from time to time also.
I have not fished this year enough, and that is something that I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but I'm going to set one for 2025. I will fish a lot more in 2025 than I did in 2024.
That's for sure. I will kudos to Tyson. He's been critical even in the legislature. He worked on the Sentencing Commission Guidelines Committee recently. I'm not saying it went all that well. But DUI sentencing is getting probably the most complicated sentencing scheme we have in the state right now with DUIs. And, in fact, I was going to talk to Tyson today about maybe we need to come up with some sort of flow chart of how to do this because we're getting new guidelines for next year on the DUI with serious injury and extreme DUIs and DUIs and deaths. It's getting really complicated. He's going to get more requests, and we're going to need more help figuring out just the sentencing. The courts and the defense bar are both asking that we don't do DUI legislation for a few more years because even the judges are saying we can't figure this out anymore in the time that we have allotted. I know. The Highway Patrol made that request as well.
Yeah, they have. So he's critical. We have to keep retraining our troopers year after year after year after year. We need to have some stability.
I agree with you when you speak to Tyson. Tyson's just a go-getter. And I appreciate that. That's why you're so good at it. But I also don't want to hurt you.
I'm in a good place. I was kind of there in the spring, I'll be honest. I was burning a candle with both hands. I was going, going, going. But, again, that was more me. I learned lessons early in my TSRP career that I had implemented, and then this year I didn't follow those lessons very good. So next year I'll be better at that. And that might mean that some of you might call me and ask me to do something, and I'll say no. But that's okay. We'll get the things done that need to be done. Bob, what do you think?
I don't know that we need another full-time TSRP. I don't know that we will ever need another full-time TSRP. It's just, as I'm constantly having to tell my folks, you've got to learn how to say no.
And there is some of that. And some of it's maybe not even a no, but just not right now.
Right.
Like, I can get to you next month, like if it's a training or something. If it's somebody, they've got a trial next week, it's not I can't get to you next month, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, hey, we need you to come do this training. We've got an opening next week. Can you do it? And the answer is usually yes. But sometimes that's going to have to be no. Get me on the next time you guys are doing training. Like, I appreciate South Jordan. Ed knows this. Their police department reached out to me months ago. And they scheduled me, like, on five different sessions into 2025. They're like, hey, can we just get you to come? And we're going to just cycle through our whole department over and over and over again. And I had, like, five different training sessions set up, like, 14, 15 months in advance. And I'm willing to do that. If you have agencies that want to schedule stuff, I control for the most part. I mean, I've got to go to fall conference next week. There's things I've got to do. But other than that, I control my calendar.
Tyson's coming out to train our police officers on report writing. Spent a lot of time putting the program together. From what I hear, I want to attend it. I'll attend it next time. But what I hear from my officers is it's fantastic.
Wait, yours are open to that?
What's that?
Yours are open to that? Yes. Because ours are not. They're not.
And that's been the biggest challenge. But I'll tell you, I've not had a single time. And I've done this now in, like, four different states and then all across our state. I haven't had a single place that I've been not say that it was not a really good use of their time. And I usually think report writing trainings are super boring.
And with so many gun officers, particularly in our agency, so we appreciate it.
We get them out of their comfort zone a little bit, but it works. It's good. It's a good program. A lot of collaboration with some of my counterparts around the country to help me come up with what we ended up with.
And let me just, with Trent, you've got his report. The reason he's in Memphis, I don't remember if we mentioned this at last council meeting, is with his work with, as some of you may know, Derek Coates, investigator. He's trained with us at our advanced sexual assault course. He's worked SOCI cases. He worked for state investigation. I think he was at Salt Lake. Anyway, when Derek went to the, it's not RTI. That's a military thing. No. The Training Institute. I guess it is RTI. It's just not the Regional Training Institute that we would call it in the military. It's a different RTI. Anyway, National Training Agency is, he introduced to his folks at DOJ our TIVI, Trauma-Informed Victim Interview Protocol, and the training that we've done. And as Marlise was transitioning out and Trent was coming in, we met a couple of times with DOJ, and they were very interested in our sexual assault course, interested in our TIVI, and asked if we would help them develop and work on their national curriculum. And so that's actually where Trent is, why he's in Memphis. He's with Derek Coates, and they are training trainers. And so that just speaks volumes to the training program that we have here. And so that's where Trent is this week.
Props for Trent as well. I went to one of his trainings at the 8th District Court here just a few weeks ago, and my judge last week actually quoted Trent in a sentencing hearing. So, you know, I called it a classic stalking that's going to result in death. It was great.
I can tell you guys, Trent has been fantastic. He is really, really good at what he does, and he's a huge asset to our team.
Yeah. He connects well with officers. You know, Marlise, we have been really fortunate in the resource prosecutors that we have that they have that background in their field. You know, Marlise was a victim advocate before, and Trent, having been a detective, an SVU detective, you know, talks cop talk. When we were interviewing, you know, you always go back and forth. For a sexual assault prosecutor, do you need a female prosecutor to connect with victims? Well, since we're not working directly with victims, you know, we're training cops, it has just worked out really, really well. We've just been, I mean, Trent and Tyson are top notch. So we're just really fortunate to have them both with us.
Next meeting.
Oh, I want to talk about this multi-state job fair, if we can. So late, what are we? I guess it was earlier this year, my counterpart in Arizona reached out and contacted Colorado and I and included New Mexico and wanted to know if we would be interested in doing a regional job fair. And I know that a lot of offices are struggling to find. Some are not. Some are really fortunate that you don't have that struggle. We've never done a job fair in the state. And I was kind of like, well, yeah, that sounds really interesting. And they said, well, we would like to do it in Utah. And I thought, okay, well, if we can do it here in Utah, I'm on board with that because it wouldn't require, you know, you all, all offices that wanted to participate to travel out of state. And so we tentatively agreed to host one here in Utah. I'm just curious, you know, how many offices would be interested in participating. I know Jeff doesn't have a problem with hiring. I don't know about the other counties, but right now, Carbon and Morgan counties were the only counties that responded to my query that they would be interested in hosting. And if that's all it's going to be, Colorado has said that they would host because they actually have 17 offices that would like to participate, meaning that they have 17 people that would be willing to come to Utah for a job fair. But if we've only got two from Utah, I'm not sure that it would be fair to Colorado folks to come here when the majority of the interest is going to be from their state. Has anybody ever done a job fair? I have not. I mean, I kind of have a vague idea how they work, but has anybody actually gone to a job fair or sponsored a table at a job fair?
My office had one at the law school in Salt Lake here. We had a table there and handed out some Duchenne County stuff and things like that. Actually, a lot of interest. We would be interested. We're still down a ton. I'll go to Colorado.
I think a lot of the law schools all the time for job fairs.
Okay. But are you interested in—I'm just thinking of this just this morning. Are you interested in helping support a job fair that potentially takes talent out of our state? That's a good question.
Yeah. And that's a fair question.
Because most of the draw is to the U and BYU.
Yeah.
I mean, I haven't gotten an applicant from the U or BYU. I tried. We had a summer this year. I actually went up and hired a 1L. I paid a 1L to come work for us for the summer. And we had applicants from the U or BYU for that. But when I post openings, I don't get applicants from the state. Kids anymore. When I went to BYU and I told them what we were paying, they laughed at me. It's cost of living. So—but—so our starting pay right now is $100,000. The Clark County VA's office starting pay is like $78,000. And Maricopa County in Phoenix is like $80,000-something. So—
Do I have a high turnover? Yeah. I'm not having a ton of luck keeping people, but it's been a struggle.
Do we need to go back to the legislature and get them to raise the ceiling again to pull everything up?
Yes.
Pause on that one.
And so let me clarify. The intent is that there should be a draw for students from other states to come here. So to your point, would we be sending our talent out of state possibly, but at least Colorado and Arizona are telling me that they're going to advertise at their law schools and their social work programs because it's not only for their prosecutors, it's for victim advocates and others.
They think they'll be bringing Arizona and Colorado people.
Right.
And they want it because we can't get it out there. I have a friend who did one of these in D.C. She's from our community, so she graduated from law school this year. She was in southern Virginia, went to a fair in D.C. and had offers to New York City and Denver from the job fair.
Is that the NDA one that they do in conjunction with the capital conference?
I'm not sure what it was, but that's where she went to it and she just started a job in Colorado from a job fair that she went to in D.C. that was just a prosecutor job fair.
So I guess my question for the council, is that something that you want me to pursue or should I tell Colorado to run with it?
For me personally, I'd like to be here. I'd like to be able to participate. If it's in Colorado, we're not going to.
Is it something you could even do a break-off from what they're doing? If you're really interested in just Utah people just...
We should hire you from anywhere.
I don't care.
If you have a job fair here, the chances of having somebody from Minnesota come to our job fair is pretty low, right? You're looking at probably Utah people and you lost those students.
For the most part, I think you may get some people from neighboring states, Idaho and Colorado. If it's close enough, depending on the time of year, where it's going to be.
Well, we're looking at April 5th or 6th.
So you're looking at spring semester. Graduation is about to happen. I think you're going to get a lot of students. I think you're going to have quite a few students from Colorado coming over. If they've got 17 offices, they're going to be involved in this job fair. They see 17 opportunities to stay in the state if they want to stay there. If they're interested in public sector law. That's really the draw for me. This is about public sector work. So the expectations are for public sector.
What I can offer is if it ends up being in Colorado, I could go and represent the state. I could take stuff from Duchesne, from Morgan, from Carbon, from King. Any of the offices that I would like to be represented, I could go and do that and put on multiple different hats. But I just don't want to commit to it if we don't think it's really going to be worth our time.
It's always worth it when I need to fill a position. Some of us are so small, I can't plan a year ahead as to when I'm going to recruit somebody. I've got an opening I need to fill as soon as possible. I'll say our luck with the universities has been zero. We've had zero applications. I've been told by our personnel director who talks to people, it takes too long before they can put it on there. We're an interview by the time their students even know there's an opening. They just have some long process to get it through and we're not that patient. So it's worth it for us if there's an opening in our office at the time. I would say statewide, a lot of us are small offices. As a group, we will have openings. Individually, I don't know if any of us can say I hope I don't have an opening in April because I will cry. I've been city attorney for less than a year and a half and now I'm on number three as assistant attorney.
If you were willing to do a table, this just has the random openings at the time.
I know we will have several openings.
We're always hiring.
I hadn't really thought about that. The big versus small. I know the smaller is always looking but to your point, Randall, is you need to fill the position right then whereas Salt Lake and Utah and AG's office that are constantly looking.
We're fully staffed. Our commission has stepped up trying to compete with the AG's office and Salt Lake DA's office is our competitors basically but we're hoping to get four more SVU attorneys in the beginning of the year. I told Bob, my issue with the job fair, the reason that I'm not all that interested is because we're really not in the market for new attorneys. One, two year attorneys. We've only got two justice court attorneys and that's not who we're looking for.
How many attorneys do you guys have?
About 45 to 50. Who do you recruit from to get your people? Salt Lake DA's office.
AG's office.
I've really worked hard with my HR guy. Our competitors are, we're competing with Salt Lake DA's office and the AG's office.
Isn't Davis offering a very generous salary as well?
They're very difficult to compete with but Davis for the most part, like we lost Tony Graff to Davis County but Tony lives in Tooele so I can hardly blame him for going there.
I know I've had six prosecutors just in the last three years.
We're just not really in the market for new attorneys. The ones that we do get, they were law clerks for us.
The sense that I'm kind of getting is there would be a need but not an overwhelming need whereas perhaps a better use of the time would let Colorado do it and I could go and represent the state. I'm seeing some head nods.
Colorado has two law schools.
I think so but when they told me 17 offices I thought oh my gosh because when Merrill and I were talking about looking for space we thought oh a dozen or so but if just 17 from one place that's going to require some big space.
Are they wanting to hold it over there?
I lobbied for it to be here just thinking that it would make it easier for you all but then when I said I don't know that I'm going to have as many tables as you are and Arizona only has five. They've committed to five so that's when Colorado stepped up and said we could get some space and hold it here and I said let me let you know after next week I've got my council meeting so I think maybe what I'll do is I'll just let them know let's have Colorado host it and I can go and represent Utah.
Have they been checked with the law schools as well? We just went to one last week, a public interest fair at the University of Utah and they had some prosecuting agencies from out of state there as well.
Is that right? And we talked to them and we don't get told. We get told if we want to post on the University of Utah job board we have to pay them a vote Seriously? That's a problem.
That's another thing I've tasked Emma with is to reach out to the law schools and start making that connection so I can reach out to them.
It's all about the connections with the law school My chief deputy is the one who arranged that with the U of U and he still, they still, they love him. He's the one who went out there, he handed out, our commissioners give us all kind of swag and give away and they love him. We're working on hiring two interns.
That's where we get the majority of our new people is from. We have nine students doing their legal clinic this year at our school I mean at our office and a lot of them have returned to offers at either Salt Lake City or the University of Utah.
One last thing is that I didn't put on the agenda. Is there anything more that we as a UPC staff can be doing for you all? Or anything to, I mean I think we have really great meetings we haven't done leadership training in a while. I don't know if anybody's interested if we at one of our future council meetings spend some time doing leadership or is that even a need? Or are we meeting your needs?
I think you just mentioned one which is if you can give us a better connection for us little guys with the universities especially, that would be extremely helpful. I went to one of them and I still can't get them to come.
See that's so weird that you say that because I send out, whenever I get a job announcement I forward it to BYU and the U and I always get an email back from BYU saying we posted it to our board. So, just keep funneling your job announcements to me and I'll get them to the schools.
That approach might also just work with the job fairs in the U. We have one UPC table that has information from all of the trustee offices. I imagine them not wanting that participation.
It would be odd that they're doing a public interest fair and not want everybody to work from in-state. The largest representative is a public interest university.
Yeah, okay.
Next meeting.
So we normally meet in January so I meant to look and see when Jeff stepped out and Dan stepped out. Does anybody know, let's see, what I was looking at is like either the third or the tenth. Oh no, the tenth would be our DUI boot camp so that won't work. Oh no, sorry, I was looking at Fridays. When is your retreat, Marilyn? So the week of the 13th. Is there a day of the week that works better? I wish Jeff came back. Do we want to wait and see when SWAP is going to meet or do we want to just tell them this is when we're meeting and make them adjust our schedule?
Will they meet in November?
I imagine there's going to be another SWAP meeting before the session starts and I guess it would be before January.
That's true. So let's not worry about SWAP. So is there a day of the week that works better the week of the 13th?
January?
Yes.
Mondays are typically not good for me but that's just me.
Okay. How about Tuesday or Wednesday? Tuesday the 14th? Tuesday the 14th work for everyone? Okay. January 14th and 9 o'clock at Heber Wells at College Drive.
Do you miss that building? No, I don't.
I don't know why. I keep saying that. Well let's say 9 o'clock. We'll go 9 to 10 730 unless you want to go a little bit later. Would you come up or are you going to just remote do you think?
As long as I don't lose my assistant attorney.
Rob, do you think you'll come up or remote in?
Who do you have right now? Okay.
So if we started at 9. Okay. Let's plan on 9 o'clock on Tuesday January 14th.
Anything else?
I think that's it.
And lunch should be just being set up and ready at 11.30 or shortly thereafter.
And Derek Brown is supposed to be coming?
He's here.
He's here? Okay great. Alright so I guess we are adjourned. I'm turning off the recorder.