Senator Marx, Representative Nolan, Senator Gordon and Representative Vail, and members of the Appropriations Committee, my name is Alison Weir, and I am the executive director of the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center. I am here in support of bills SB 238 to expand eligibility for the Military Relief Fund and SB 240, a bill reducing fares for public bus transportation services for veterans, and SJ 6 recognizing Vietnam Veterans exposed to Agent Orange. I also urge the committee to take bolder action in supporting Veterans in our state, and remove artificial distinctions between “time of war” service when it comes to providing benefits to Connecticut veterans.

The Connecticut Veterans Legal Center provides free legal assistance to low-income Veterans living in Connecticut. Our mission is to support, empower, and improve the lives of Veterans by providing free legal assistance to remove barriers to housing, healthcare, income, and recovery. We fully support SB 238, which would expand eligibility for grants for essential goods and service for any service member or their immediate family who are in economic need because of military service or the injury, illness, or death of the service member or their immediate family. Many military families are living on the edge, and a deployment or serious injury or illness can disrupt their ability to pay for basic needs and essential services. Often, it is the family left at home who struggles when the primary earner has been activated and deployed, particularly if there is any disruption in pay. And it is not only deployments that can impact an income stream. We have several clients for whom a serious illness reduced their ability to earn, which put their housing or their ability to pay for their medication in jeopardy. Opening the fund to those service members and their families impacted by injury, illness, or death is the right thing to do.

We also support the proposal in SB 240 to reduce public bus fares for veterans. Many of our clients do not drive, and rely on the bus to get to their appointments. This bill would provide some economic relief.

I also support the recognition of Vietnam Veterans exposed to Agent Orange as fatalities of the Vietnam War. Agent Orange exposure was not limited to Southeast Asia, but also in the areas in the United States where the herbicide was stored, as was recently acknowledged in the expansion of the presumption of service-connected injury due to exposure to Agent Orange by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to locations in the United States where it was tested and stored, including military bases in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. This recent recognition by the VA has been welcomed among Veterans Service Organizations and those like ourselves who assist veterans in applying for their service-connected disability benefits. But I suspect we will see even more expansion of the presumption as more is learned about how pervasive the use and storage of Agent Orange was and the long-lasting nature of the agent. Agent Orange was a powerful substance with a residue that would linger in the airplanes used to spread it and on the bodies of soldiers who were processed in the morgues stateside. We had one client who suffered from cancers associated with Agent Orange who had never deployed to Vietnam, but who had received the bodies delivered from the theater in a morgue in the States. Until 2019, the VA said that Vietnam Veterans serving the “blue water” Navy were too far removed from the areas of spraying to be exposed, until the VA changed its stance to allow the claims of those serving within 12 nautical miles of the coast of Vietnam. Agent Orange was a powerful herbicide that also had devastating effect on our service members. I suspect we have not yet identified the extent of its reach.

Thank you for your work to improve the lives of Connecticut Veterans.