Homeless Issues Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everybody. Welcome. I'd like to call this meeting of the Public Protection Judiciary Committee to order. Staff can take the roll, please.

Chair Furman. Present. Furman, present. Supervisor Gray. Gray, absent. Supervisor Larson.

Larson, present.

Larson, here. Supervisor Lewis. Lewis, present. Lewis, here. Supervisor Trucios. Trucios, here. Trucios, here. Supervisor Veldren. Here. Buildings here. Why do you remember Kietzman it's been here. It's been here. Why do you remember motor.

Alter here.

Sure here.

Chair we have a quorum and has like our first item next item of business would be consideration of the minutes can I get a motion. And to prove. Thank you are there any questions comments corrections suggestions on the minutes. Not seeing any, unless we hear otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent. And we'll move on to our referrals. Our first referral of the evening is 2025 Res 439, Purchase and Contracted Maintenance of RevCord Call Logger. We do have, I believe, one registrant that wishes to speak. And they should be on Zoom.

Correct. Promoting Marissa now.

Hey, Marissa. Marissa, you need to accept the promotion. Marissa, you can go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you for hearing me tonight, everybody. I really appreciate it. I did send an email to the committee as well, so I'm basically going to be reading those remarks. But I want to introduce myself. For those I haven't met, I am the president of Local 1871, the Dane County Professionals, which represents professional employees across Dane County. And tonight, as you know, you're considering Resolution 439, which authorizes the purchases of a RevCord call logging platform for For the public safety communications department, and this is the 1st time that this resolution is before this committee, the agenda was posted on Friday. And that was the 1st time that our local was able to look at the full contract prior to that. We had seen the bid waiver, but this was the 1st time we were able to see the full contract. The resolution indicates the cost of the county is about $340,000. However, page 13 of the contract itself indicates about $123,000 of this contract over a third of the total cost is for an additional product called REV AIQA. uh so the bid waiver i referenced indicated this is an ai enabled review to assess call taker protocol compliance and that that functionality is necessary to expand the quality assurance beyond the approximately two percent of calls currently evaluated our local represents two quality assurance technicians that are currently employed in the department and one of the primary functions of the staff is to review the calls coming into 9-1-1 um You know, what we wanted to do at this point is kind of review the documents and then compile some questions for you to consider. We know the county needs a call logger. The question now is more so, do they need this AI integrated feature within it? So the first question is, was the Rev AI QA solution required to be purchased with the RevCord contract as a whole, or was it a separate add-on purchase? meaning could the county purchase this product without the QA solution and reduce the total price by $123,000? Number two, the fiscal note for the resolution does not indicate whether this contract is using operating or capital funds. We expect most of the hardware would use capital funds, but the invoice appears to indicate that the Rev AI QA is a software support service. And typically these sort of things are part of the operating budget. So we're trying to clarify that question. Third, the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch and Priority Dispatch Corporation did put out a joint statement about how some of these protocols are used. I included the full statement in writing for you. I'll skip it now. in the interest of time. As the county utilizes the protocols in question, though, I'm wondering if the county and or RevCord or the Northland business systems have secured the proper licensing in order to ensure it's going to be appropriately using that intellectual property. Finally, would the department be uploading policies and procedures to this AI in order to train the program and how could that affect our partner agencies? So, for example, the City of Madison Police Department also has an extensive call for service policy specific to their agency. And my understanding is the city recently extended their moratorium on AI. So it's unclear how uploading a city policy into this AI solution would intersect with their policies. So on a broader scale, we'd like to note that AI, which performs quality assurance, is absolutely no replacement for our human quality assurance technicians who understand the human concepts of grace and reasonableness when evaluating the calls of our 911 dispatchers. These human concepts are understood and incorporated into the existing quality assurance workflows and provide a softer approach to improving future performance. My understanding is the director supports and expects this approach and has previously decided against accreditation as the accreditation bodies I mentioned above due to the stringent nature of some of those scoring standards. Consequently, if this AI is indeed an absolute necessity, we believe it may be helpful if not necessary. to create a policy to appropriately distinguish the roles of AI in QA versus the roles of our human QA technicians who are county employees. Additionally, we'd want to see further conversation and understanding about how the data will be integrated into existing processes within the department, such as performance evaluations. Especially if this is an add-on feature to this contract and funds for the software will be utilized from the operating budget, we would ask the committee to postpone this item to allow for further discussions between Local 1871 and the department. As we continue to anticipate a difficult 2027 budget, we want to ensure that we are using the county's resources widely and appropriately. It's also worth noting that the county does have an AI governance work group, but this work group was not consulted prior to the department soliciting these AI services, nor has the department engaged that work group since, although we do believe that the work group would welcome such an engagement and discussion. I thank you for your time tonight.

Thank you, does anybody have questions for this registrant? The director will come up and speak to this item in a moment. Any questions? Not seeing any. Thank you, Marissa. We have Director Bixler here. If you'd like to come on up and talk about this item, and then we'll go from there.

Absolutely. Thank you for allowing me to speak to this. Absolutely. Just like Marissa said, our current caller... I'm sorry. Can you just introduce yourself? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Louis Bixler. I'm the Director for Public Safety Communications for the 911 Center. So and just like Marissa was saying, our current call logger is end of life. So it's actually been end of life for a couple of years. Now it's the point to where we can't get any firmware updates, anything like that. Everything has been sunset from it. What a call logger does is it essentially records all the calls that we get in. The big part of that is for records requests. Following that is investigations by law enforcement departments, fire departments, EMS. They do use those call recordings as well. It creates a valuable record that can help in those investigations. So it's a key piece of technology for a 911 center, not just ours, but for the industry and within the industry itself. We have, currently what we have is a veerant system we had contracted with. We are going to get an eventide system, which was a different kind of call logger. Regardless of the system, we have our QA staff sit in with the demos to kind of see, okay, this is what it is. This is some of the difficulties we hope to be able to overcome with the new call loggers and so forth. One of the reasons that we ended up not going with the Eventide logger was because of that proprietary information with ProQA, which is part of our protocol system for our medical firing EMS calls. So they had actually, Eventide had stated that they wouldn't allow any of the third-party platforms to integrate with their system. which wouldn't have allowed us to be able to QA our protocol calls, which are about 90% of our calls. So we pivoted. We were able to go to this RepCord system, which met that requirement. One of the challenging aspects, because I think, again, Marissa hit it right on, that I am not a big fan of technology that can potentially take the place of staff, especially in an industry like 911, with us. One of the difficulties with technology in general is everyone calls their technology AI. So this toothbrush, it's created with AI technology, right? Everything comes off like that. We had run the platform itself through our DIM, our county DIM, who came back and said, no, that's not AI. What it does is what they're claiming to be AI on it is actually the dashboard system. So what it does is, and this is coming straight from the manufacturer as well as the business provider. So what this does, it allows search for specific calls and segments within seconds by using keywords. So as opposed to being what we have to do now, our QA staff and our record staff have to listen to a call to be able to identify what it is. Some calls are two minutes, some calls are 20 minutes. So it's a big time suck just to find out what it is that you're listening to. This helps identify that with their AI. That's what they're calling AI. It's really just a protocol-based system that we enter the protocols and the dashboard is able to find and locate the information a lot easier. So basically it narrows down some of the time that our staff are spending on tasks that aren't relevant to the actual QA itself. This doesn't actually listen to the call itself and give any kind of scoring or grading system off of that. It has the potential if we wanted it to, but we don't because in the past, 911 used to be completely protocol-based to where that's how communicators were scored. If they deviated from the script at all, it knocked down their score for the overall call. There's times where we have to deviate from those protocols. So that's why I took away accreditation and not seeking to go through it with the provider, because it just hems in the communicator too much at the expense of our callers. So the other part of the AI and what it does, it is able to tell, to determine if there's any kind of trends or anything so that our supervisors can listen to call, can use it to help coach some of the staff as well. Right now with only two QA staff, we can only listen to one to 2% of our calls overall. So that's not a real accurate representation of the calls that we have out there. Using this QA technology, with the dashboard, our supervisors then can come into and be able to gather that information to coach our staff. We're not grading staff on those. We're using it to determine, okay, are there some customer service deficiencies? Are there – what's the average duration of the call? Things like that that we can use to really get our top and lower tier performers into a median so that we can really – get that to use to gain more efficiency and doing it in a real factual evidence-based manner. As for the cost, this is actually part of a grant that we have with the state of Wisconsin. So $124,000 of that is covered through the state grant. The additional part that isn't covered is the maintenance and the REVI-AI portion, which is that additional funding, which is... approximately a hundred and twenty three thousand dollars of that is what's being paid for out of operating funds the additional that's left over is some implementation cost that's being paid out of capital expense so when we budgeted this We had to budget it before we found out what we had in the grant. So we have $233,000 for this in our budget, in our capital budget. So obviously we won't be using close to all of that because we're able to offset it with the grant. The other part is we had... Very early on, about four years ago, we did a AI QA piece called Cordy that was sold to us by Priority Dispatch Systems that was supposed to be able to listen to calls and get us. At that time, we were outsourcing our QA. We didn't have internal QA. So we were outsourcing QA. This was supposed to help bridge the gap. it was a failure we trudged it along for about a year trying to make it work it didn't work that contract just like this contract is written to where we can eliminate those services within with 30 days notice so this ai cord or this ai uh rebbe portion of it isn't a piece of hardware it's something that we can cancel at any time and we purposely did that because we want to be able to see and make sure it's something that is going to benefit us the first 90 days of it are at no cost but you're not going to get much value out of the first 90 days the staff are being trained up to it and that's where we're going to establish okay how exactly is it going to be used what the limitations of it as far as also what are the limitations within our staff to be able to use the technology there

Thank you, Director. Are there questions for the Director? Go ahead, Reser Larson.

Thank you. From just your last comment there, you said the first 90 days are at no cost, but that's not enough time. How much time do you project would be enough to give it a good valuation? Sure.

Based on previously what we've had with our other software packages, it really is that eight-month to a year timeframe. I tend to be a little bit more aggressive and say, oh, we could probably do it in six months. But in the middle of that, we have a building move that's going to take a lot of capacity away from us really evaluating some of that.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Supervisor.

Yeah. Thank you for taking the time. Could you go into a little more detail regarding the person that you said certified? This wasn't technically AI per county policy?

Sure. That came from Sam Olson. And we got that as part of the bid waiver process that we got for this. So we did have some concerns from Supervisor Brower. I believe on PNF. So we had a lengthy discussion during the PNF session for that. And what that ended up doing is it got a little bit more clarity with PNF and the product itself. And it also was able to evolve into, once that passed, is meeting with our 720 steward who had some concerns about it. So we were able to meet with her and advise, OK, this is what the program is. This is what it does. This is how we're going to use it. I just, we recently got into a, we had the QAs move unions to the professionals union. So I mistakenly assumed that our 720, and I'm not blaming the 720 steward at all, but that they would share the information with that as the QA specifically came up during that meeting with them. Lesson learned for me. I definitely should have reached out specifically to that EGR to advise that, hey, we did have this meeting with the 720 steward. We just want to share it with you.

Gotcha.

Thank you for the background on that.

Just to follow up, you mentioned that it technically can't Listen, I imagine it processes text that's already processed in order to do the work that you described.

Correct. So any protocol that we have to feed the protocol into it, it can't just guess it on its own. So that's where like with the Madison Police CFS protocol. It wouldn't do that. No, we wouldn't have our QAs do that anyway because we listen for our protocols, not for other people's protocols.

Gotcha. Do you know if that's strictly internal, all of the review of that protocol data?

Correct. Yeah. Once we transfer a call outside of our ACD system, we no longer record. We don't do what's called, basically it's cradle to grave on our end. So once it's outside of our ACD, we're not listening anymore.

Gotcha. I guess to be really specific, the quote-unquote AI that's not AI, the data that that processes is purely hardware-bound local. It doesn't send anything off via the internet?

No, correct. Exactly. Fantastic. All those are on-prem. All the hardware is on-prem. Okay, awesome.

And I guess the last question is, would you be able to proceed with this if we did strip this line item from the contract or send back for review? I don't know. Maybe that's a question for Chair Furman.

I mean, you can ask him.

We could proceed. I don't know resolution-wise if it would be able to proceed with a motion or not. Would the product work? Yes, absolutely. Okay.

I guess the question would be more so, can we strip it out now and add it again later? But that might be a question for a conversation with... We could.

There would be a slight increase in price just because the implementation would have to be done at two separate times. Gotcha. So essentially the installation and support of that initial install would be doubled or...

Perfect. Thank you. Sure. Just wanted to make a point of clarification. Sam Olson's the chief information officer. Oh, okay. He runs Dane County IT. Perfect. Thank you. Supervisor Willis, do you have questions?

Yes. Go ahead. So thank you, Director Baitler. You mentioned that we listen to 1% to 2% of our calls currently. So with this software, you would be able to, like, look at all of them? Is that kind of how it would go? Correct. It's like a search engine? We...

It would be able to look at more calls, but it would look at specific trends. It wouldn't look at specific data. So it wouldn't be, per se, listening to all the aspects of the call. That's where we need. And the reason we go 1% to 2% is because that's actually what's required by the industry as well as with our priority dispatch contract.

Okay. Thank you. Sure.

Supervisor Veldren? Sure. First, let me just... PNF hasn't fallen off yet. Is the grant before the 340 or after the 340?

It's after the 340. So we would subtract the 124 from the 330. All right.

That is operating because it's, I mean, it makes sense to me.

Correct. Because the REBI also, the AI portion also includes the maintenance, the annual maintenance for five years.

So then we're going to do maintenance differently if we take that out though, that module, that.

That could potentially be left in, is just removing the REBI and then having the maintenance broken out of that. Also, the maintenance, just for background on this, the maintenance is actually, once you break it down, it's about $5,000 less a year than what we're paying with really outdated technology. So another plus on that.

And this is more of a review. This is reviewing calls. Right. Exactly. That's exactly what it's for. It's sort of a teaching tool in a sense. Teaching tool. As well as creating records. Yeah.

Okay. That's all. Thanks. Thank you. Any other questions?

I have a follow-up.

Go ahead, Supervisor Larson.

Thank you. With regard to the... I totally lost my train of thought. Give me a moment. Well, two things. One is if we did, for example, in a year, choose to currently adopt the REVI portion, and then in a year you assessed it as unnecessary, would that be a prorated cost then, or is it like we're all in for the whole amount regardless?

We pay a prompt for it, and then Northland would have to reimburse us based on a prorated cost.

My train just came back. With regard to the recommendation from our first speaker to discuss this with the AI governance group, Would that be something, I'm sorry, governance work group, would that be something that's obviated by Mr. Olson's declaration, or is it worth or of value to speak with him anyway?

So, yeah, we wouldn't be required to. I mean, and quite frankly, what we did with the bid waiver portion of it, I more than fully explained it. Okay, thank you. Sure.

Was it timing on the whole thing? Sure. You said you're currently outdated system. So you really would want to get this really installed.

Correct. And based on when the finalized contract is completed, it can have a turnaround time of less than two weeks before it's operational.

And how long have you been sort of operating with the system at its capacity to not be able to? Sure. For about eight months now.

All right, thanks. Supervisor Larson, Sam would be involved in that AI group, so he would have recommended it go there. At least I'm guessing, but I know he's very involved in evaluating AI, et cetera. So I assume if he looked at it and said he didn't think that met the definition of AI, then there would have been no reason for it to go to that group.

and this this one i'm sorry but also this uh this particular product we've been this has been going on since january february so it was before the the ai governance board really got going so um i just want to clarify that as well that we're not like oh bypassing them we don't want to hear from them it's uh it's just really a timeliness issue of when it came up sure

And yeah, just a quick clarification, I guess you've kind of implied it, but I want to try to get it really specific. I just went through it again, top to bottom, I never remember seeing an initial date for this contract to go through as far as like when it'll be executed. As of right now, is there an execution date or a date this contract would we're projecting it to go into effect? Or is that still pending the resolution approval?

Right, it's just pending the resolution. Hopefully, if it gets accepted by the board, it typically would be a day to a week after that.

Awesome. This has been in Legistar for a while. This didn't just show up on Friday. It's been since mid-last month.

Right, April 21st is when it actually got put in and posted.

Okay, thank you. One more thing. On your big waiver. And you said that folks had checked out other systems to prior to that.

Correct.

So it's a bid waiver, but not completely sight unseen. We're taking the lowest bid and that's it. Correct. Looked at other products. Absolutely. From that standpoint, it's not something that's completely just brand new. or in a regular RFP, we're really getting to sort of try it out.

Exactly. And we didn't bypass the bid waiver for it to move quicker because it's been out there for a while. Thanks.

Okay. Can we go ahead and somebody want to make a motion? I'll move it. Okay. Moved by Veldrin. Is there any additional questions?

Yeah, do we want to potentially consider delaying to our next meeting to kind of have raffle conversations regarding whether to strip this one line item portion out before fully recommending or I don't know how much of a delay.

You're welcome to make that motion and then we can discuss it. Okay. There's one motion bullet for us though. We have three on the table. You can, yeah. So do you wish to refer to our next PPNJ?

Yeah, I would move to refer to our next PPNJ meeting.

Do you wish to discuss your motion?

Yeah, I think that this would allow us to have a little bit more conversation regarding whether to strip this one line item, particular in light of the fact that with how much of a grant there is to be provided by the state, a lot of the expense to be paid for by the county is for this individual item, which. isn't necessary to the function. The key thing, of course, before us is to get the software suite up and running and the hardware for it up and running so that our employees can provide the services that they need. Two weeks might be enough for us to consider fully solidifying the fact that we do want this software suite in at the $125 or so thousand dollar cost.

Discussion?

I think it after what Supervisor Furman said and Director Bixler said about this already sort of being vetted a little bit and folks in EGR being sort of In a discussion as well, I'm not as concerned every time the word AI comes up that we have to stop and dig our heels in and stop proceeding. I think I'm comfortable with this moving forward, so I would vote no.

I guess as a point of clarification on my perspective, I personally think that, number one, I can understand why this would not technically be AI. It's just more of a buzzword marketing pitch term. And even then, I feel like this is a really good use case for a kind of algorithmic suite product like this. My concern is purely financial. It is a $6 line item that not is not strictly necessary for the equivalent replaced function of our current outdated system and that's why i'm putting it forward for two week review as to whether we want to fully invest that six uh six digit dollar amount can you clarify more how we would be reviewing that what what what actually would happen in those two weeks what would you expect to have happen

is there a particular discussion with a particular group? I mean, what is it that we wish for the director to come back with in two weeks with?

Yeah, I guess potentially more feedback from our workers, the two individuals who work in your department. I figure any kind of feedback from them would be greatly appreciated, especially if they've had time to review or discuss internally. Obviously, there's been a bit of a mix-up regarding... Just kind of not leadership, not necessarily talking to each other again, like you said, nobody's fault per se, but just to try to get the clarification on their perspective on the item, since they would be the ones primarily using it.

Other discussion, go ahead, Suvarza Larson.

A question for Director Bixler. Would delaying it even however long potentially jeopardize either the grant, the timing, or noting that you're already kind of limping along with some bad tech, what would be the impact of delaying?

So the delay, it wouldn't... have any impact on the financial aspect of it. The grant is good through the end of the year, as well as the funding. The timing aspect of it is, again, we're operating on a system that has absolutely no backup right now should it fail. That's what's scary with it, if I may. One of the things that you all may want to suggest or consider as well is, and we've done this before in PSC with 720, is a commitment that management will work collaboratively with the EGR to come up with those policies and things, and then report back to this board, whether it be quarterly or every other month. One, it puts the commitment on management to follow up and make sure that those are heard, because I agree, it could have been done better.

That being said, thank you for coming and talking to us about this item.

Thank you.

Any other discussion?

I guess I just have a question on timing into our next meeting is the 9th, June 9th. So wouldn't be before the board until I'm just guessing that 2018. Chair Andre or my chair, since you're here, would you know the schedule for PP or PNF in June?

You know first and 15.

So don't go to the June 15th PNF if you could stay on that kind of track. I mean, obviously will be the 1st and then, but.

Either way, the 2nd County board meeting general meeting is June 25th. So it would be a 3 week. 3 week delay from the June 4th meeting.

It will be at this. It would also be the 2nd board meeting. Oh, Jim, Jim. Right? Yeah.

Other discussion.

I'd actually like, if it's possible, to speak with the first person that came, Ms. Barack. if it's possible to do that?

We don't. We could suspend the rules if you want to. We could suspend the rules. Do you feel strongly?

I'm comfortable with the concept that we could, you know, max out of that portion of the contract after the fact if it proved to be, you know, have additional features beyond what the director's already assessed here, that the information's staying local, that it's not being shared with the giant cloud globally. And, you know, noting that the witness indicated that she wasn't, her group wasn't able to really review this in the amount of time that... They permitted for it. I'm comfortable moving forward with it and not risking the idea of having the entire system go down. I've had that happen to me at a big job, and it's devastating and certainly where you are. I would hate to have this very important vital system, literally vital system, go down in that period of time. So I'm more comfortable moving forward now and being able to remove it later on. But I just wanted to see if that new information assuaged the concerns that were raised.

um is she still in the call sorry um is is is the the uh okay um any objections suspending the rules i'm seeing no objection we can go ahead and promote her and bring her back voting marissa now So you've been promoted, you're back. I think you hopefully have heard our discussion. And I think Supervisor Larson's question is, you know, what is what is your opinion of, you know, I guess where we are now and your comfort level on on proceeding with that one particular component?

Thank you. I appreciate the suspension of the rules and bringing me back. I also really appreciate the discussion and the thoughtful questions that you all have been asking. And I think we would look forward to working with the department and trying to figure out how to best move forward. You know, I do appreciate that overture. And so... You know, I obviously, I am a social worker. I work at the Aging and Disability Resource Center. I do not work for IM. I do not work for 911. This is not my area of expertise, and I would never pretend for it to be. You know, I have heard concerns from the local 1871 folks there about kind of how this is going to be used, the future impact on jobs, if it's going to be used to replace, you know, or supplement their services. So those are our primary concerns. I think that we, of course, have the county's best interest at heart, and we would not want to contribute to any system problems. We also are very concerned about the budget. So I think we have kind of dual competing things going on. And so what I'm hearing is that it sounds like... this is coming out of operating funds for this piece. And so if, I guess my question is that if this piece were to be removed, does the grant essentially cover pretty much the rest of it? Because if this isn't really needed, if it's more of a supplement, then I do have concerns about the budget. But that being said, you know, I think if it, you know, gets down to it, we would, I think that I've heard good things about your department, Director Bixler, and how you've worked with the EGR 720 and the labor relations you've done there. So I do trust that you would have those conversations in good faith.

Thank you. Supervisor, go ahead.

Marissa, would you be able to meet with or correspond with the membership, the two individual workers, regarding this item over the next week ahead of our June 4th meeting, the general board meeting?

Yes.

Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for the registrant?

I do. Go ahead, Supervisor. So I think... Supervisor Larson had mentioned, you know, maybe taking it out later if it doesn't work. How does that work? How would we know? Hang on a second.

Are we all set with a registrant? Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. I didn't have any questions. Okay. Sorry. Thank you, Marissa, for your help this evening. And we'll go to questions. You can go back and go ahead and ask the director.

Yes. So, I mean, would you come back to the board? I mean, what would be the process if you find out that piece doesn't work or there's some issue, we want to remove it?

So the contract stipulates that it's a 30-day written notice to the lender. So that's all that would happen. I think this is where meeting with and then helping establish what are the specific goals, because I do think the QAs should have a specific part of that to establish that, and setting up those goals and what the fail point is. We know from the operational side and the management side of it, the fail points would be if we're not getting the efficiency or the effectiveness that we see. and helping increase their scores that are being scored by the QA techs, then that's where we see a fail point. And that's why it takes a little bit of time. The three months isn't a realistic time to see that effectiveness in increasing QA.

Thank you. And the QI people were involved in the evaluation of this?

They sat through demos. So they sat through demos for this program as well as the previous one.

And so they're aware of the functions that this AI provides and how it interacts with their jobs, et cetera. As much as you can in a one-hour demo. I appreciate that. Thank you. Any other questions or discussion?

I would like to withdraw my motion specifically in light of the emergent nature of the product as well as the fact that it seems like we will be able to have the discussions ahead of our general board meeting next week.

Okay. As long as there's no objection. Seeing no objection, the motion now on the table is approval of this. Any other further discussion? Seeing none, unless I hear otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent. Okay, this item's approved. Thank you, Director. We will see you again momentarily. Absolutely. The next item on our agenda is 2025 Res. 446, awarding a contract to Heartland Business Systems. Our clerk of court, I believe, is with us. Hi, would you like to speak about this item?

Yeah, so this is just the follow through for our capital budget from the previous budget cycle. So we had an outside agency come in and do an assessment for us to develop the RFP and equipment list to update the technology in the courthouse. It was a very competitive bid process. I think we had 10 or 11 actual vendors come in. It was assessed through the RFP, and this is just the finalization of that contract. The overall contract itself is under budget for our total capital project, and we are hoping to move forward on this as quickly as possible.

Thank you. Any questions? Not seeing any, can I get a motion? I move to approve. Okay. Any discussion on the motion? Unless I see otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent and we'll move on to our next item. Our next item on the agenda is 2025 Res 447, awarding the contract to the Wisconsin State Law Library. Going back to our clerk of court again on this item.

Yeah, so we have had an ongoing contract with the Wisconsin State Law Library to provide our law library services and the statutory required services for the jail residents. This is just an update to that contract. We had a request from the state that apparently when the contract was originally written, It didn't include some language that kind of violates their constitutional or statutory mandated state requirements. And so essentially the contract here is just updated for language. At the time, they also asked us if it would be possible to, so we'd been continuing our previous contract on one year kind of addendums, and they wanted to have a more solid, just ongoing contract to address a longer period of time. And when we had talked with purchasing, they felt that that was actually preferable because it gives the county some more consistency and knowledge about what the future will look like for this contract. And so, This is essentially just an extension of the previous contract we've had. Additionally, the State Law Library has been historically slow about asking us to update their actual cost. And so we're probably about three years behind in coming up to parity for the actual cost of running the program. And so this contract does update some of the fiscal spend for the contract time period to kind of meet their actual cost. There is a provision in the contract that requires a state law library to pay back any money that is paid over their actual cost, but I think we've never even come close to that point in the history of this contract. So essentially this is just continuing uh the services uh that we provide uh primarily to our pro se and and folks downstairs in the courthouse and again also to our jail residents as is statutorily required thank you any questions can i get a motion

Supervisor Larson, move for approval. I have a question for Corporation Council about just an explanation for some of our new committee members. This financial information says that there is no increase for 2026, but the budget for 2027 will be reviewed. What would happen if the... county board did not approve the funds for 2027. What happens with the contract?

So in all of our contracts, we have what's called a convenience clause that essentially says if the board does not appropriate funding sufficient enough to cover the contract, the contract will be terminated without cost or any other obligation on behalf of the county. Appreciate that. Thank you.

Supervisor Furman, if I might as well. Please. So we did address that piece within the actual contract itself. And so additional language that was cleared with the state and with the Corporation Council was that there's a provision in there that allows the contract to continue forward, but the state to provide reduced services and staffing hours in order to meet the whatever budget is provided.

Okay. But the county board can also decide not to fund this at all, and that would terminate the contract. So obviously that's very unlikely. I just wanted at least people to understand that that's how that works for these longer-term contracts. But I do also appreciate the additional information that if somehow we can't afford this increase in 2027 when the budgets are being figured out, that you guys have figured out a less than ideal, but at least a workaround that would keep some portion of it alive. So thank you for providing that information. providing that information. Any other discussion or questions? Not seeing any, unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume approval by unanimous consent and move on to our next item, which is 2026, Res. 010, Addendum to Provide Services and Hardware for New Telecom Equipment. Director Bixler, would you like to come up and speak about this item?

Louis Bixler, I'm the director of, no, I'm just kidding. So what's being presented before is, as I stated earlier, we are moving into a new building. Hopefully building construction will be done in August. After that time, it's fitting the building with the technology and furniture to move in. What this does is it expands the, so we're expanding from 22 seats that we have in our current center I'm sorry, 21 seats to 42 seats in the new center. So this basically, what it does is it puts the phones and the technology that we need to answer 911 calls at those stations, at those physical stations at the new center, not changing a particular contract or anything like that, just expanding the number of stations. Here within the CCB, the current phone infrastructure that we have will have to remain because this will become our backup center within here. The resolution says 31. So 31 because we're not putting them at every station yet to try to keep the cost down because it is going to be it'll probably be well let's be honest 20-25 years before we get an additional um the 20 to 30 staff. Okay so any questions?

Go ahead and summarize real quick.

So you're going to keep downstairs going? Correct. For how long? Forever, as far as our backup center. Where's our backup center right now? Backup center is currently attached to the medical examiner's office, and that's 12 stations. Good to know. Sure. And the reason that that backup center wouldn't be good is because it's right next door to our new center. So basically our backup center, if we kept the one.

I don't want to know what you're thinking about.

Any other questions? Thanks. I believe we need a motion. I have to approve. Okay. Any discussion? not seeing any unless I hear otherwise I'm going to assume approval by unanimous consent and we'll move on to our next item which is 2026 resolution 027 and this is for reinstating a very long description but um automated license plate uh reader system um we do have uh supervisor Andre with us who is the sponsor of this item um would you like to come up and speak to this item We do not have anybody that's wishing to speak. We have two people that did register that are in opposition to this item. They do not wish to speak.

Okay. Very good. Yes, thanks for the opportunity. So there's been a lot of interest in the license plate readers that we had with FLOC. Of course, that is... an action the board took relatively recently to end that contract, which is still coming up here. It was a failure of mine in committee at the time not to have a more robust discussion about the fiscal components of this and looking at alternative vendors to provide a similar type of service, but one that would be more transparent, accountable, address community concerns about the flock system in particular. So essentially what this resolution would do is basically pull the funding that was previously allocated for the previous and still ending current system, not allocate any new dollars, but pull that back so that the sheriff's office could go to RFP for those services for justifiable law enforcement and public safety priorities. So it outlines a bit of the data and then sets forward, um, based on some of the input we've heard over various meetings about this and committee member and board member discussions, sets forth some process expectations as well as standards for a future system such that there might be consensus among parties and the public about those priorities and result in an outcome that the board could feel comfortable with. So my intention is to really air any of those questions and have a path forward that the committee would be comfortable with, such that we don't end up with a vendor at the end of the day that is problematic. so would be open to and it is you know something i've consulted with uh captain simpson and the sheriff about um and my understanding is that um you know there's some information about whether this is actually a budgetary amount that a different vendor would be able to work with so i think there's some information the sheriff could provide about that tonight i'd be happy if this committee wants to discuss this at a future meeting understanding that there is a robust item before you that's a little bit more time sensitive related to the jail communications RFP but really I just want to make sure that the committee is comfortable it gets questions answered you know has back and forth if needed so I don't want to rush this through but if You want to come back to it at a future meeting to air those questions, feel welcome. I don't think there's a time sensitive nature to it other than, you know, the existing system will be ending shortly and then there will be a gap that I see in terms of those legitimate public safety needs. But happy to answer questions about intent in this or process and go from there.

Thank you, Supervisor. We do have the sheriff here. I do want to thank you for trying to be as specific as possible about what the requirements would include in a future contract. And I would be happy to allow questions, happy to take a motion to postpone if people aren't ready to dive deep into this. Does anybody have any questions for the sponsor?

I guess the only thing that I really have is, as far as I'm aware, the only two main competitors in this space are a company called Axon, or maybe it's the products called Axon, and Flock. Are you aware of any others?

Um, so I have not done independent research about this, but there was another vendor that reached out to the board this, this spring to say, Hey, we do this too. That was neither of those vendors. So I know the sheriff's office has had some conversations with one of those other vendors and could shed some light on that. But, um, I think that is the benefit of a competitive RFP processes to provide that opportunity to those that we may not be familiar with.

Hopefully too. Awesome.

There was a third one that basically said, you guys are looking for a lot of data control. You want more public input, oversight, et cetera. We could do that. I would hope that vendor would apply through a competitive process, but again, don't know how that would go.

Thank you.

For sure.

Questions either for the sheriff, or we could also entertain a motion and then go to questions.

We approve the resolution.

So Supervisor Larson approves, moves approval. Sheriff, you go ahead, you can speak to this if you'd like.

Yeah, I just wanted to answer that question. There are actual other competitors that are out there. Axon is one of them, as well as Motorola and PlateSmart. So those are just three companies that are out there that we're aware of that could also provide us with everything that we need moving forward if that time can. So thank you for the opportunity, Chair and Supervisor Andrea.

Is there discussion? So obviously this resolution has a lot of requirements, a list of eight. Also a request to come back here and show us a draft of the RFP. Any questions, thoughts about the requirements? Is it missing something? Something seem like too much to...

Does this actually change the process then, the RFP system?

Are we actually sort of doing that? So Supervisor Andre is asking for us to be in a more successful position of being able to see the RFP before it goes out to make sure that we're all on the same page so a contract doesn't come back to the board that's harder to approve because it didn't follow the requirements. Yeah.

Okay, does this change anything, Carlos, for overall RFPs and countywide, or can we sort of do this as a one-off? Has this been done? I'm trying to think back my time on public works.

Something like this has not been done. Toes very close to the line of perhaps an overreach into what the administration does regarding the RFP process in terms of requiring a draft to be presented to the committee. One of the dangers of doing that, of course, is we tend to want to make sure that the drafting of the RFP remains confidential so vendors don't come in and they gain a competitive advantage as discussions are made. as to how should something be phrased, how should something be emphasized versus another provision. Now, some of that could be cured through a closed session. So that's something that I think we would need to take into consideration. However, it doesn't change how we would handle RFPs countywide. The only unique thing is whatever ends up being in that second-to-last resolve clause, those seven or eight elements would have to be incorporated into an RFP. Otherwise, the vendor wouldn't know it would be a requirement for their bid. So that would be somewhat unique.

I have another question for Court Counsel. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I guess it's more of a comparison. Is this similar, if not the same, to the request to see an RFP in advance of fully going through as the next resolution on our agenda?

It's similar.

Okay.

Thank you. Okay. Any other questions, discussion?

I personally have a lot of reservations regarding ALPR systems on a principled basis. I don't think that any company that specifically goes out of their way to design, create these systems, especially if they're networked, in particular if they're integrated into whether that's a local or especially if it's tied into a wider system that the company themselves have a much broader access to. I don't think that that is a really, I don't think that it is a good, indicator of what's potential longer term. We're kind of building the infrastructure for overreach. Now, I don't think the county has any, the county, the sheriff's department is anywhere near a threat in that same way. However, just given what's the state of our society and our government as a whole, I personally have a lot of concerns, in particular, just regarding the capital influence. Corporations that design these systems in order to maximize profitability will inevitably seek the same patterns that Flock has had through their success, whether they are committed early on to one thing or another. My main concern with the actual language here is I don't feel like there's really any opportunity to audit per se the ongoing activities here. Maybe I missed it within the resolution text or the requirements that are specifically laid out here. A company can say they're going to meet these goals and maybe their contract would be terminated on the spot if we did find out, but how proactive can we really be And I guess just on a matter of principle, I have extreme concerns about the taxpayers paying to create the infrastructure of a lack of a better term, a surveillance state, and privatizing that state so as to get around the Fourth Amendment.

Supervisor Andre, did you want to address the point of, I think one of the auditing point possibly?

Yes. So, Supervisor, is the concern about auditing more so, like, are Dane County Sheriff's Office staff using the tool to, you know, all of the proper ways we're supposed to be using it, or is the company itself adhering to privacy and security, et cetera, measures?

I think it's more so the latter, that they're fulfilling, that they're sticking to the letter of the contract and the intention in particular of this resolution. I do appreciate that there are always going to be concerns about implementation by individual members of law enforcement, as we've seen with the current ongoing fiasco in Milwaukee. But from this context, I'm a lot more concerned about any kind of opportunity for the executive to or the board to be somewhat involved with oversight over the corporate following the requirements laid out here.

Thank you for clarifying. This was a question that came up with Captain Simpson when I was speaking with him about it because the question was whether essentially a third-party audit happens at a regular frequency or does a vendor having a particular credential in the privacy and security space, which is not really my... comfort area. I can't speak to that, but would either of those meet the letter of this resolution? And if there's a way to shore that up further such that there are actually vendors that go through a third-party auditing process and provide those results, I would certainly be open to strengthening that component of it. I don't know if that's something that happens or rather is it that organizations get these credentials and, you know, came up like SOC 2, which is something I don't know what that is, but other people in the committee did. So if they have that credential, does that meet the standard we're looking for? So open to any feedback about how to make that stronger if it is. Indeed, something that is an industry standard. But here are your concerns. Thank you, Supervisor Andre.

Yeah.

Any other questions or discussion?

I have a question for Supervisor Andre or the sheriff. I guess on the original contract, how long was that? Do you remember? The sheriff does?

Yeah, please direct that to the sheriff. And it was not an RFP-ed contract. Vendor.

Okay. But the contract must go ahead, Sheriff.

I'm sorry. Could you repeat your question?

Yeah. I just wanted to know how long the original contract with Flock was. I'm just getting into the whole audit and review. And then what can we put in this? Who will we select the next vendor?

Yeah. So if you're asking the length of the contract, I believe it was year to year that we or it could have been a little longer, but it wasn't anything like our other contracts that we've seen, whether it was three, one and one. Also, just for a point of clarification, I know there was some discussion about potential, you know, violations of the US Constitution with the use of automatic license plate recognition with vehicles. I think the US Supreme Court many years ago made it very clear that We do not have an expectation of privacy on the outside of our vehicles. So license plates are visible to the public. They're available to the public. And so there would not be a violation of any of that information from a factual standpoint. Now, on a principal standpoint, I really can't. dispute that. Lastly, I know there was something that came up. I was hoping that, Chair, you would be able to get clarification from court counsel on the eighth point on here. I think it's line 73 that talks about public transparency measures, including public disclosure of clear Dassault policy. and data use and annual reporting to the Public Protection and Judiciary Committee. I'm just confused on that, and I was hoping for some clarification for our purposes, because we would put that in their contract, that we would put our policy and our data use. Is that correct, that eight would go into our contract with them? Would that even be necessary?

Appropriation, Councilman.

Again, so what lines 59, the resolve clause that starts with 59 would dictate is we would insert those terms into the vendor's agreement. So it would be somewhat awkward to sort of ask the vendor to display the DCSO policy if that's what that number eight is intending to do. So my advice would be we would rephrase or somehow restructure number eight and to focus mainly on the public transparency measures that the board or the committee is looking for.

Supervisor Belger, go ahead. Yeah, thanks. I guess in light of what you had said earlier in this discussion, would this be apropos to postponing for at least some committee? We can sort of work on this. Or are you comfortable with this? I don't know. I'm asking you, are you comfortable with this? I mean, I'm sure you had discussions with council before it got to here.

Yes. Attorney Galt reviewed the language. And I think that's a fair point. You know, that resolve clause could probably be pulled separately out such that it's not actually reflected in the contract. I think it would be helpful to have a better sense of this committee, you know, and from the public on, like, what are those public transparency measures so that we've got a shared understanding of what that is. I'm comfortable if the committee wants to come back to it for that deeper discussion, but you could also, you know, move lines 73 to 75 out of that resolve clause and just make it a separate resolve clause and add some language to that if that's the item that is of complexity here.

Is it going over? I guess I'm not sure what that resolves. So it would still remain a contract requirement. Is that correct?

So essentially the request, you could move that into... basically not something that's in the contract itself, but that indicates that there will be public transparency measures and that the policy is clear and that reporting happens separately from what's included in the contract itself, similar to the provisions above, like starting in lines 51, 55.

I just note that line 76 through 80 already sort of somewhat duplicates it to where you put it. Maybe that already does it.

Yeah, this could go through several drafts. So... maybe that has already been addressed sufficiently through other components of the resolution.

Was your intent to have it in the contract or just for more for us?

The intent is for the committee and the board, yes. Maybe. That's a good catch.

And, Carl, so does that, the way it's written, does that mean it should be in the contract, number eight? Yes, so number eight would be part of the contract somehow. I'm going to just move, let's move to strike line 73 through 75. Okay. Thank you for that motion. Any discussion? So to make sure that every, what we're doing is making sure it's not, the language isn't for the vendor, but it's still for us, and we can still do what the intent is.

Yeah, and as noted, 76 through 80 more or less says that same thing.

Point of information, did we already have a motion before us to approve? That's correct, yes.

So this is an amendment. Amendment to, okay. An additional motion on top of it. Any discussion, questions? I have no problem with cleaning it up. Yeah, I mean, I guess that, you know, the only concern, as I've spoken, you know, Supervisor Andre and I have talked about the independent third-party auditing. You know, I think there's still time between when, you know, the RFP draft is put together to have some sort of clarification there. You know, I think it's probably incredibly difficult for us to do our own independent third-party auditing of a solution. So, you know, hopefully we can figure something out that's more practical, but I think something like that is important. You know, some sort of not just taking the company's word for it type clause.

And surely it is not my intent that the county board or any county staff are completing that audit, rather that there is some sort of a process by which that is occurring externally to the vendor.

Thank you. Any other discussion? Okay, so the the motion that would be voting on is Removal, it would be approval, but are we going to amend first and then approve? So it's going to be amend this item which means removing line 73, 74, 75, which is bullet point eight public transparency measures including public disclosure of a clear DCSO policy on data use and annual reporting to the Public Protection and Judiciary Committee. Unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume approval by unanimous consent. Okay, so this item has been amended, and so now the motion on the floor is approval of this amended item. Is there any discussion? Questions?

I just want to voice before I vote no on this item. I do think that this is something that the public would have a lot stronger opinions on if they had an opportunity to present and speak on it. I've already made my personal opinion clear my longer term concerns. But that's all I have to say.

Thank you. Any other discussion questions?

I have an internal question, I suppose, regarding clarifying the language of the requirement number one for the contract. You were just discussing how to tighten up or have a more feasible approach to the third-party auditing. How much time would you think is required to... discussing postponing the vote in order to clarify that portion?

No, my suggestion was that could just be clarified going into the actual RFP itself. So we are asking for them to come back and show us a draft of that or show the public a draft of that so everybody would have an opportunity to see that, including respective vendors, to be clear. So we're not, you know, unless something changes. I mean, so, Carlos, I... If that's a public process that anybody can participate in, is there any reason why that can't be? What would be the reason why that couldn't be a public discussion about the actual RFP itself?

Again, we'd have to involve the sheriff's office in this discussion just so that I know whether or not there's some competitive issues with doing that. Because, again, typically we don't want to – signal to potential vendors, here's how we're going to decide things, here's what we're really interested in, here's what we're not interested in. Because language can only reveal so much. And so if certain vendors are watching that discussion and then seeing how we translate it to in the RFP and other vendors don't, then it gets to be somewhat complicated. So the RFP process is a public process for the vendors. I mean, they typically post it through OpenGov. If there are questions that come through the vendors, they're responded to through purchasing. So that process is happening anyway. I don't know whether or not the vendors will necessarily benefit from hearing the public discussion about it, but it may, unfortunately, again, we should check the sheriff's office. It may undermine our ability to get the best price for the best service. But a lot of that could be cured if we do it in closed session.

Okay, so the actual discussion or the disclosure of a draft?

Probably both. If the discussion is going to talk about what's going to be in the agreement or how we're going to describe it in the RFP, then that should be in closed session. What will be in the RFP is already listed here. So that's not really the issue. The issue is how will we evaluate it? Will we give it 10 points, 20 points?

That seems like it would be an inappropriate, across the board, inappropriate discussion publicly on this is how we're going to score it. It's more a matter of are we in agreement with how that is being asked for? I think I'm going to ask Supervisor Andre, I believe that was your intent was, you know, let's make sure that we're clear about how this is being phrased, not how we're going to score this or decide the vendor.

Correct. And to be fair, there may be, you know, the board may have perspectives on scoring criteria that differ from the sheriff's office, but it's not my intent that the committee get into that level of detail in detail. public or closed session.

Okay. Go ahead, Supervisor.

Yeah, just kind of, I guess, more pontification on to kind of decouple the questions regarding third-party auditing. I read this resolution first point as being an audit of the practices and privacy protections in place by the contractor, by the providing contractor. organizations, essentially kind of like a review of the contract terms and of the company itself to confirm that they meet the expectations that we set forth versus the prolonged back and forth that we had regarding the ongoing third-party auditing once a contract has already gone into place and we're kind of assessing how the data practices are being followed on an ongoing basis. What do you think of that, Supervisor Andre? Is that fair?

Yes, that That captures my intent that basically there is a vendor and the vendor must have very sound privacy and security protections about all the data. They must have some sort of external proof that they're doing what they say they're doing properly and not that there's a process established in this resolution that says that is happening on an ongoing basis. I think that would be unreasonable.

Thank you.

I wish for there to be discussion now so we're clear. It is not my intent, and if we're thinking otherwise, we need to talk about this right now. It is not my intent when we look at this draft to be talking about scoring. It's very much, was this... What is it being explained to the vendor in a way that makes clear our policy goals, not here's how we're picking the applicant here is how we're going to weigh this versus that. Because if we're going to do that, we would almost definitely have to notice closed session. But I don't necessarily want us even going in that direction unless there's strong belief otherwise. And I'd like us to talk about that now so there's no different expectations when this comes back to us and we're not prepared for that.

I definitely fully agree with what you're describing, that we should avoid essentially laying out our criteria, how we're going to weigh thick contracts once it comes before us, after the fact, not doing that, to be clear.

Yeah. So, Reyes, Veldren, go ahead.

Yeah, I guess this is more to absorb this, and just that this seems like it's getting, as Carlos said earlier, a wee overreaching. And I understand that we want certain controls, and I certainly appreciate that. But are we getting into and then expanding the RFP timelines of how long this will take? And if we do this here, then it goes to the board. And does the board then have it? Because that's inevitably what will happen. So this could really, what I see is stretching this out. I'm reading something wrong.

Sure. Supervisor, be clear. This doesn't say, you know, it's to be presented to the Public Protection Judiciary Committee and the full county board. I think, you know, this, I think RFPs are, are, We end up having to decide on the contract, and I think it's important for us to make sure we're getting a contract that we made sure reflected the values of the community on a really important item. And so I believe that's why this process is being pointed out here. It's not to say going forward that every RFP is going to go through. Right. you know, an incredibly long process, understanding that these RFPs take a really long time, and that would be, you know, very onerous, but also recognizing there are some situations where something like this is incredibly important, that we don't waste the sheriff's department's time, we don't waste the board's time and the public's time with a contract that's not gonna get approved because it didn't match our values.

And I guess I was getting ahead of myself or thinking the process. Yeah, no, we're not. Just this part would go to the board, not the actual.

And I don't think the intent is us for even to have an up or down vote of the draft at the PPNJ meeting when it's presented to us because that's not our authority to do an up and down vote. It's to provide the feedback and then the Sheriff's Department will. take that feedback and go forward or not, but at least there won't be surprises by the public or sheriff's department or vendors, et cetera, of like, you know, what were our values? That makes me more comfortable.

And I do kind of just want to agree with Supervisor Veldren on one specific point. The idea that in much broader stroke, not specific to this instance, but RFP processes in general, I do see the concern regarding other committees, other members of the board saying, well, we can bring this to our committee and see the RFP process before us in a similar kind of way that what we're doing here. And I can see how that could be overreaching and burdensome to the executive perspective. I do think that this is really important for this specific situation given the extensive prolonged back and forth, heartache, public feedback, and the effort and time that was put into that. I do think it's really valuable to put the values of the public first through this body. And I think that having a closed session to kind of talk on that would really advance those goals. I guess to anybody, um, my understanding is this as we go before the executive, the executive herself would be signing off on the idea that this RFP would be coming before us for consideration. Is that true or no?

Yes. I mean, so because this resolution will be, we'll, we'll, we'll go to in front of the full board and then the executive has the ability to. Either sign that or veto it. Okay.

So there wouldn't be any, in real sense, we wouldn't be stealing some power of the executive. She would be allowing us to have this narrow instance of a little bit of review.

That's correct. Carlos, do you have any other, any things that you'd like us to discuss so we're all clear on it? Any expectations or do you feel more comfortable, as comfortable as you can feel? Okay. As comfortable as you can feel about what is not in the process.

I would say, I guess, like the language is just a request to the sheriff's office. And as long as, you know, the body understands that it's just a request, the sheriff's office can very well decide no. There's not a separation of powers issue per se with the language itself. So to that extent, I'm comfortable with it. Thank you. Any other further discussion?

Okay, review, we are voting on now an amended resolution where we remove those lines. Unless I see otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent.

I'd like to register in opposition.

Yeah, so we have one no vote. So it would be unanimous. Otherwise... Looks like we are good. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Andrade.

And thank you for thinking about this proactively. The idea is both board and committees and the sheriff's office are kind of operating on the same page and mitigating challenges down the road.

Thank you. Our next item is 2026, Res. 038, talking about the Dane County Jail Resident Communication Services. Long title, I'm not going to read. This is my resolution. We do not have anybody registered to speak, but we do have one person registered that is supporting this. I will talk just very briefly about this. Very similar to the last item we saw, we are trying to... provide some information to make it hopefully smoother and easier for the approval of a new jail residence telephone and video visitation service. This resolution does also request the Sheriff's Department to come back to us And again, it's a request with an RFP for us to make sure that it aligns with our values. The key items in this is that it's important that the technical standards that were defined in the original 2025, January 2025 RFP still be the technical requirements. With the exclusion of mail scanning, the unique new new item is asking for subsidized communication options. One of the following recipients can are people that reply the RFP can provide either a partially subsidized tier or a fully subsidized tier. And then also asking for a prohibition on tablet usage fees. making sure that there's enhanced data privacy and that the ownership and control is by the Dane County Sheriff's Office. I have already spoken with the Sheriff's Department, Chief Deputy Nygaard about this and it looks like he is taking this feedback into consideration and would likely come in front of us at the next meeting and show the RFP because it's incredibly important for them to get this RFP out as soon as possible and then obviously do all their processes towards that and then bring us a contract for approval later on in the year. I'm happy to answer questions about this, but we also can have discussion. Yes, the Sheriff's Department, any questions? We have several people from the Sheriff's Department here. Supervisor Trucy.

I would like to move to approve ahead of discussion. I'm a really big fan of this resolution. I think it captures a lot of the public comment, a lot of thoughts and opinions and the values that are really important when it comes to discussing this item, like The last resolution, having an inter-review of the RFP ahead of it going out to vendors would be a really good way to get ahead of the public feedback and ensure that it meets our values and criteria. The only real question or, I guess, comment that I might have is just regarding the use of the word one of the following as far as providing this partially subsidized or fully subsidized tier, would it be possible for a vendor to provide both? both options to be submitted. I don't know how that would work out, but.

Yeah, I mean, so my goal was to provide as much flexibility as possible. I, you know, I think it's important that we, you know, as it even says in there, like, you know, I want all for-profit and non-profit entities to be open to doing this. I would be curious on somebody from the Sheriff's Department if they'd like to give some comment on the idea of changing it to providing one of the following to providing both options, what their thoughts are on possibly that modification. But my goal was to give flexibility with the goal of having some sort of level of subsidy, understanding that some vendors may need it to be fully subsidized. They may not have a model, and other vendors might, you know, be able to do something that, you know, is a little bit more customized. You know, give X amount of time, or here's a bulk time, and depending on our budget here, here's how much we could buy, and then the rest would be charged. I wanted there to be flexibility with offerings, but I see... Chief Deputy Nygaard has turned on his camera. Would you like to address that? Would the sheriff like to address that?

I'll have Chris address this.

Can you just introduce yourself, Chris?

You bet. Chief Deputy Chris Nygaard. So I think probably the most clearest, easy to understand way to do it is to have kind of a layout of the main pieces of two RFPs, one fully paid for, and then another one partial, so that way you can see the language and see if it's in alignment with similarly what you're thinking for your resolution. It works with purchasing on if there's any way to have a combined RFP where you can add both and have vendors respond to both. But it's a very difficult matrix of trying to put the benchmarking and grading it that way. So it was recommended to go one direction or the other. So I think the best way to go about it would be for us to go over two different RFPs, one fully and then the one partial. And I guess when the sheriff can probably talk about this too, is we'll need some direction from the board too, is that, you know, which one you might be interested in, just because those are two different, obviously two different costs. And it would be, you know, it's certainly all of you all that have to secure some money for us to be able to sign a contract.

So is the thought that your department would only go out with one of the RFPs and not both?

Right. We would go with one after the input from the board and after hearing the public input, we would communicate with you which direction we were going to go. They thought the grading process would be a little bit complicated to have both out there. that it would be, we would go out for one, unless something changes, that would be the case. But before our next meeting for a presentation, we'll know more about that.

Yeah, I mean, my thoughts on that, unfortunately, is it's obviously very difficult to know how much something like this costs without asking, which is a little bit more, I know, not normal with how we do RFP processes. Normally, we have a budget up front. We know how much it's going to – we have a rough idea of how much it's going to cost, and we budget that, and then we go out and we ask. And without going out and asking, it's not clear whether or not we can afford a fully subsidized tier or a partially subsidized tier, but also recognize that what you're saying is it's very complicated to be able to score both those options if they're together.

Yeah, and purchasing probably, I don't know if it's going to be on tonight, but are much more articulate than myself when we work with them to get all of our needs met. And then they work on trying to put together those benchmarks. But through discussions with them, they had a much better explanation just how complex it was. I mean, we certainly all understand the complexities of the vendors trying to move a product respond to the RFP because there's so many variables about what they're going to make on premium costs to offset, you know, if we're doing a partial plan and, you know, the moving parts of how many free minutes we'd have if it's a partial as opposed to a fully paid for one. And we have some general ideas. what a full one might cost, you know, just for the board's idea, just that we did a rough, rough guess on it. So we have those numbers. And even those numbers are still kind of out there a bit because places that have gone free saw an increase in amount of use, which you'd expect for phone and texting because they're not limited by, you know, time anymore. So they can really go at it and, you know, double the amount of phone calls and kept up a splinter can speak to it a bit. But I believe we had one of the figures was that somebody, one other agency of similar size of similar positions us right now going from a paid model to a free model for their minutes and electronic messaging had went up by like 59%, which is, Seems like a lot, but, I mean, just me thinking if I was not paying for anything, of course, I'd probably text a bit more, talk a little bit longer. And then the vendors, you know, then people have more free money to probably buy their entertainment, which is one of the favorites on these tablets. So for our projections of what this thing might cost, that's where we're going to struggle if – I don't know. Legally, I don't know if we have to have the money secured. I know we can't sign a contract. I just don't know where it fits in for having to let the board know what the potential cost is going to be after they respond to it and what that turnaround time looks like to get that money secured.

Thank you. That's helpful. I need to think about this for a moment. Any discussion questions? Go ahead, Chris.

I have one quick question for Chris right now. Chris, could you just remind us of how much the original contract was for, just so we can sort of get that kind of number that could be higher into our thought?

I'm going to... Well, for the amount of minutes for a year and... Well, we didn't pay anything for the contract.

That was zero.

But like give an idea for the amount of money spent for photos, messages, video visits and phones. It'd be about a bit over $814,000 a year. What year was that? That is 2025 data. And this is imagining, though, too, that for the messaging or emails that, you know, there's a cost assigned to sending pictures. And there's an assumption by us that, you know, if we're going to go to free communications, that would also include pictures within emails. So we have to send a picture with that. We want to have that built separately. That might be part of the communication package, just like a text. So that would include that cost as well. And then also here's a little more complicated. If you remember the last contract, you had some of the free tiers in there for what we weren't offering free phone calls. And that's where those items were being paid for from other parts of the contract. And we have no idea right now if we go out how those vendors plan to arrange their payments, you know, what they're going to offset and what they, what they project, what they might make in their entertainment, entertainment or premium if we have a partial, what they're going to try to pay for, because we're certainly going to have some of the same demands if the partial, you know, for indigent or amount of free phone calls to, you know, to lawyers and all the other items we have right now. But all we have as a comparable right now is our Viapath contract, which may not be entirely accurate once we put it out there because they're making, you know, they do their billing structure and, offset their own costs. And it's hard to say what that number is going to be. So all we could do is take the 2025 numbers and roll them up and say, well, this is what it looks like this snapshot.

Did you get a chance to actually talk to anybody, the sheriff's departments or what departments had in the country that had the free contracts?

I have not yet. I'm not sure. I don't see. Oh, Captain Splinter. Kelly, can you hear? We'll see if it works.

I'm on my third electronic, so no guarantees this will work.

Captain Splinter, if you could just introduce yourself.

Yep, I'm Captain Kelly Splinter Security Services over at the Sheriff's Office. We have not talked with direct states. It looks like a lot of them is the prisons. We were out at a conference last week and some of the companies that we talked to, it sounds like... people are starting to go to it. When we talked to bypass currently, I asked about anybody our size wise to get kind of a comparison and what they saw for a percent increase. And he did not have anybody on his list that was doing that just yet. So I don't have that information just yet.

Thanks. Other discussion.

Yeah, the idea of having to narrow ourselves down to either one or the other as far as subsidized, partially or fully subsidized, it feels against the spirit of the resolution fundamentally. From my interpretation, and feel free to correct me, Supervisor, if mr chairman is that the goal would be to have a mix of partially subsidized tiers and fully subsidized tiers to consider before choosing to pick for resolution based on the economic up what is available uh economically for the county at the time of consideration um essentially saying that well it's hard to know in advance whether moving forward with a fully subsidized tier would really be viable if all the options are far beyond what we could expect um budgetarily

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the struggle is, you know, if, you know, we decide that we can find the funds to pay for this for to be clear. I mean, this is talking about voice, text and video. And I think that's very clear. The sheriff's department, we're not we're not going out and saying, you know, premium entertainment, which apparently is, you know, a big source of revenue for these companies. But it's the core keeping in touch. If it comes back and, you know, It turns out that it is incredibly affordable to subsidize it fully. I think that's what I'm struggling with is I think we want the option to say we're going to pay for all voice text and video because the number is something that aligns with budget that we're able to find. I don't want us to be precluded from being able to to make that determination, but also recognize that what I'm hearing is. that in the discussions with purchasing that you folks are struggling with how you would score something like that and how you would pick the winner of the RFP process if we're going with the idea that it's partial or full or we're not really sure what the numbers are. So The spirit here is to try to be flexible, but the feedback I'm getting is that's very difficult to translate into a process by the team that's going to decide the winner. Deal with that, I guess my question would be, if if we do get a proposal from via path or or made up company made up company communications and they say, you know, here's the cost of voice, text and video. If Dean county buys bulk rates, there's probably nothing that stops us from going back and saying, okay, we have the budget and we're going to go forward and we're going to pay for a hundred percent of that or or I mean. we're only going to pay for partial of it. There's probably nothing that precludes us from making that decision after the fact if we know what the bulk pricing is up front. So I think probably a small tweak of the language probably can get us to a place where the baseline is partial subsidized, and if the numbers come back where we can figure out a budget, we can always buy more. That's probably where I'm leaning is just tweaking that language a little bit. So we can go out with our fee. That's not saying fully subsidized, but now a subsidized tier where we understand what the bulk rate is. And, you know, we go from there. Chief Deputy Nygaard, having worked with purchasing on that, I mean, and being the point person on this right now, does that help clarify a little bit kind of the thoughts of the intent of a subsidized tier? Yeah.

I'll take it back to him, but I see what you're saying, though. Basically, it would be an RFP with a partially subsidized tier, but then them costing out something if it was fully paid for another amount of money. And I think with the discussions with purchasing, what it is is like having to bifurcate those two different pieces. Scoring, somebody may score really well and they're partial, but then when they... come back to the package with the fully paid, it may look differently. And that may be something undesirable and how they grade that. If we have somebody that has a fully subsidized one, looks very desirable, looks more desirable and their partial does not, you know, how those two, how those all bounce out when we grade them all. So maybe it'll take me a while to just kind of digest this, but, you know, going, see if there's a way to write it. for a basically a partial, but then with a rate asking for a rate of, you know, if the rate's different for a full, you know, when the county is fully funding, but I don't, Yeah, it's working with this contract, and Kelly's worked on this in much more detail than myself. There's so many entangled pieces in here, you know, from the data time, the events themselves, when you build those things, and how they all interact right now, what pays for another thing, and they may give us something for free. but I'm sure they're balancing it out somewhere else. And how we grade that on a response, I think that's what purchasing is. We're just a little bit nervous about how to grade those and if there is such a model. And so far, the ones that have reached out and got some RFPs out there, San Francisco has a fully funded RFP. RFP that was responded to, and those are obviously picking up. And then there are some partials, but I have not found a partial that has what you're describing with the option to do full. But that's not to say there's not one out there or we couldn't be the first to do it. So I'll take that back to purchasing and just see if there's anything else and communicate that to you.

I'm sure he'll appreciate this. Carlos, do you have any thoughts as we have this discussion? You're a wordsmith. That's part of your job.

I'm trying to understand whether or not it's simply just to include the partial subsidized tier and then have the fully subsidized tier as an option to that as well, but... Then how do you score that?

That's what they're struggling with.

Again, I think what this resolution does, it says it needs to include these options. The difficulty is going to be how do you select one that has, let's say, a really good partially subsidized tier versus a bad fully subsidized tier or vice versa. One option, which I don't know whether or not this would work, is basically you give everyone the same points as long as they provided some option there. So basically, these would not really be the deciding factor of any RFP process. It's like saying, indicate whether or not you have a place of employment in Dane County. They check the box, yes. They check the box, no. They check the box, yes. They get automatic 10 points. So that's one option is basically you don't weigh these. You just ask them to provide it. But then the other factors would have to be weighed.

Or could you just not weigh the full subsidized tier? You just weigh the partial?

Yep. You could do it that way, too.

Do you think that's something the Sheriff's Department would be comfortable with, with the idea of asking for both options but not giving a weight to the full? Because the full is kind of unpredictable and big, and it's more a matter of like... know the big focus is is is you know because of budgetary concerns the partially subsidized with the bulk option but you know and and you'll read it if one company is saying the partial is you know uh uh for bulk is three cents and the other company is saying it's four cents then you know we'll go with the four you know the three that the sheriff's department would likely go with the and i'm making up numbers i apologize that um but you know that sort of idea which is the best partial um subsidized tier but also knowing what the full would be, and that gets no score.

I will certainly run that by purchasing. I mean, they may resolve it as long as we have one piece to grade and then have them let us know right off the bat what's going to cost for a full. Not that we'll take it, but, yeah, I'll –

We'll run that by.

They may do it. They may do it. Yeah. At least they'll give us one way to grade and then say, provide a supplement that will be graded.

So, yeah, I mean, this is an ask. So I don't know if I'm going, I may probably want to tweak this language a little bit. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So instead of one of the following subsidized communication options, just say provide subsidized communication options with the bullet point one and two, knowing that, you know, you're going to have to go back to purchasing and have a predictable path for all involved, frankly. Right. I mean, you know, here's how you're going to treat this. And we'll talk about that more when the RP comes here. Yeah, knowing that, again, we're not going to talk about how you're actually scoring that, but just, you know, here are the parameters that are most important to the scoring process. Okay, so go ahead, Superman.

Do you want to potentially consider delaying this off? No, we can't.

Yeah, I do not want to take any more of the Sheriff's Department's timeline. Let's go ahead, Carlos.

If that's the case, I really don't see a need to change the language, right? Because you're giving the discretion to purchasing to decide, basically to evaluate them based on one or the other. And they could draft it by saying, provided the subsidized one or you could provide a full one, but if you provide a subsidized one, please estimate what a full one would cost.

Right, and this is not requiring a fully subsidized tier to be provided. So if a vendor decides not to provide it, they don't provide it, it sounds like it likely won't affect their score, but purchasing needs to be comfortable with at least it being the ability to evaluate it. Okay, so it doesn't sound like we need to make a change. Thank you, everybody, for going down that journey. Any discussions, questions? Supervisor Veldren.

I guess from a vendor standpoint, why wouldn't they give us their lowest numbers? And if it's us paying or... The residents paying part, why would they not want to give us their best numbers anyway?

Is it just a matter of who's paying? So anytime if there's one entity buying something in bulk, there many times is a bulk discount versus my wife paying to talk to me as a jail resident. You know, she'd be buying 10 minutes for the phone call conversation. That's an individual transaction. Outside of the county. Right, outside of the county.

Because I'm thinking we're just buying it all.

No, no. And then we're sort of like everybody gets. And the way this model works traditionally is it's paid for by the community. It's paid for by your loved ones, your friends calling you. And what we're asking for here is the ability to subsidize it. No, I understand that. In a bulk way, assuming that we're not going to get charged the same amount because we'd be buying a bigger number.

So who's deciding on the partial subset?

Are we doing that? How much it's going to be? Yeah, after we find out the pricing, we're going to have to figure out that budget number. That's the difficulty with this where it's like we don't know how much we need to spend on this.

Why would the vendor need a different number? Why would they want a different number?

unless they i mean their service is the service isn't it but again the idea is they're you know we're asking we're asking if there's a bulk discount available it's possible they come back to us and say no the rate we charge the community is the same exact rate we're going to charge you and then you know that's something to be considered but the idea is if We're in a position now to negotiate, and you would think if they knew we were paying for it that they're going to try to give us the best possible deal because they want this contract. I mean, one vendor, if they are a penny less or whatever, that makes it more attractive for us. Any other thoughts, questions? Not seeing any, unless I hear otherwise, I'm going to assume approval by unanimous consent. Thank you, Sheriff's Department, for being here this evening. I appreciate it and look forward to probably seeing you at our next meeting. Thank you.

Thanks.

Okay, so we are now to our educational part of our... our agenda as if the previous part was not educational enough. We have two departments here this evening to give presentations, introductions to their departments. And the first one is Public Safety Communications Department. And I will invite up the director I will ask to save questions to the end. So write down your questions. If you're afraid you're going to forget them, let the director give his presentation. And I'm going to go from there. So welcome back. It's about a half hour, so.

I'll make it quick. I'll make it as painless as possible. All right. Get started. So Dane County Public Safety Communications, most of you all know it as 911. That's typically what it's called. Next slide. So what is public safety communications? Um, so we're a public safety answering point to PSAP. Um, you'll hear that, uh, acronym a lot when I come up here. Um, and so what we do is we serve 21 law enforcement agencies throughout the County, 26 fire departments, um, a couple of those being in adjacent counties, um, and 21 EMS agencies. So, um, Lots of chiefs for us to talk to, which is always a pleasant ordeal. 911 calls. So we take all the 911 wireless calls for Dane County, with the exception of Middleton. We've been established by the Dane County Board as being the primary center, the only center that should be taking wireless 911 calls. In the past, that wouldn't have been a big deal. Now, when we're considering wireless and mobile phone calls, those tables have turned to where wireline calls are only about, we're talking about 12% of the total calls we get. So most of them are wireless calls. And for landline calls, again, we take all of them for Dane County with the exception of Middleton and UW. Okay, next slide. So in addition to 911 calls, we also take non-emergency calls. Our non-emergency calls come in through our non-emergency line, 255-2345. If you do call that number, you do get an IVR, what's called a phone tree. And the reason we do that is we get a lot of information. potential calls that aren't for the dispatch center. We get calls that are asking for visiting hours at the jail, what's on sale at Hy-Vee, things like that. There's no 311 system in Dane County. So we become the 311 center because of that. So the IBR is able to keep some of those calls away from our dispatchers because the same dispatchers that answer your 911 calls are the ones that answer your non-emergency calls. The majority of the calls, and you'll see in a little bit that we take within the center, is actually non-emergency calls to the tune of about 53%. Administrative services that we provide is through criminal justice information services. If you've had the pleasure of being pulled over by one of our fine law enforcement agencies, you may hear them ask for, you know, run a license plate, run a license. That comes to our data operator, then runs it through the criminal police. History Division of DOJ to see for driving statuses through DOT and any type of potential warrants or anything like that, as well as criminal history. So after our services, we do provide, we enter warrants, emergency warrants, as well as emergency felony vehicles. During business hours, those specific departments, even within the smaller jurisdictions and smaller municipalities, enter their own warrants and things of that nature, just because it's a lot more streamlined. It goes through those judges and things. But after hours, they don't have the staffing for that. So we provide that. Non-emergency services that we provide, some people may not realize, but some of the things that we dispatch for are parking for City of Madison, park rangers for both City of Madison and Dane County, county highways, especially in winter, it's a lot of talking with highways, coordinating plows, things of that nature, animal services through public health, goes through us um so you know everything from water utilities to uh to forestry so during uh during normal practices it's not a huge volume but as soon as we start getting into the summer months where we start seeing some of the adverse weather come in that'll really start picking up Next slide. So Dane County PSAPs. So we're what's called a consolidated PSAP, which means we dispatch law enforcement, fire, and EMS, and recently also mental health through CARES. Most centers fall under the auspices of a sheriff's department or a law enforcement agency and focus primarily on law enforcement. So that's one of the advantages of having a consolidated center that's run outside of the umbrella of law enforcement. sheriff's department or police department is that we have a dedicated budget within our own and we can dedicate it to all three, our three, in this case four, specific disciplines equally or however the trends are. We don't have to worry about splitting our budget for, you know, police cars or things like that. It goes straight to 911. There are, and people don't sometimes realize this, there's some municipalities in Dane County that run their own dispatch center. Stoughton, Monona, Capitol Police, UW Police, Sun Prairie and Middleton, they all have their own dispatch center. So essentially they kind of end up paying for both. They end up paying for both. the counties, as well as the police dispatch within their jurisdictions. Now, we dispatch all fire and EMS throughout the county. These are law enforcement. And up until the middle of last year, Fitchburg was also on that list. We did absorb Fitchburg. And the goal, ultimately, not the goal, but For efficiency purposes, we'd like to absorb as many of these as possible because then we have all dispatch consolidated under one center. Certain municipalities, a lot of municipalities prefer to have their own law enforcement dispatch centers because then they don't have to share their air with other law enforcement agencies and it gives them a little bit more autonomy. when ones that we will never be able to absorb would be like Capitol Police or UW Police, those fall under the state. Next slide. So budget. $15.2 million of operating budget for 2026. About 94% of our budget goes to personnel. All funding is by GPR. We've, it's, It's a little bit more than impossible or difficult to draw revenue for 911. Unfortunately, that's the nature of the business, and also it's good that way because we're not focused on drawing revenue. We're focused on providing the assistance to our callers. 1.8 in a capital budget for last year. A lot of our capital budget year-to-year goes for our Danecom radio system. It's a very expensive system and requires a lot of upkeep on it. We do have $34 million for our new PSC building, which is funded by borrowing proceeds. I'll show you some updates on that. It's super exciting. We're essentially going from the studio apartment that we're in right now to a really nice 36,000 square foot building that'll really help with staff wellness as well as address growth. We are currently in our space. We are at capacity, so we cannot grow anymore.

Next slide.

So within PSC, we also have Danecom. So Danecom was created for the radio system itself. Prior to the jail, it was the most expensive project in Dane County history. Obviously a super critical part of public safety, that's the radio system that helps communicate, that helps PSC communicate with our field responders. They have a $1.2 million operating budget annually. Now, 65% of that is of that total cost. is for annual Danecom maintenance. So the majority of it is just for that maintenance, as well as encompassed in that maintenance is Network Operations Command, which is a service that's provided by an outside agency that basically monitors the health of the radio system 24-7. $121,000 of that pays for our radio system administrator. And 70% of that total cost is actually funded by Dane County municipalities. So they pay into the Danecom system, and then we pay the rest out of GPR and more for any costs beyond $825,000. So when Danecom was written, it was written that any maintenance costs, anything that exceeded that $825,000 a year would be covered by the county. 10 years ago or more when this was done, that was a good, safe buffer so that the county wouldn't have to pay. This year, we'll probably be going over that $825,000, so there will be more contribution from the county at this point. So that's... That also goes into about the $32,000 shortfall that some municipalities don't pay into the income system. There's no way for us to really turn off the radio system for one municipality. So there's a couple of smaller municipalities that don't pay into it because they don't have a fire department. They don't have a police department. They don't have anyone that utilizes it. They use simple systems, basically walkie-talkies for their utility systems and stuff. So that comes out of my budget, which is awesome. And then any capital projects that go through Danecom that we fund through the PSC. And like I said, that's the majority of our capital projects because within that Danecom system, that radio system, you have a lot of high-value components, microwave systems, the infrastructure for the towers themselves, things like that, that we're constantly every year having to replace one or the other just to keep up with. Next slide. Now, one of the positive things recently is the state opened up in 2024 2024, OEC grants, or Office of Emergency Communications, and Office of Emergency Communications falls under the Department of Military Affairs within the state of Wisconsin. It varies. It's varied year to year. Last year was as high as $18 million that was given out to state PSAPs for grants. The stipulation that the state does put to be eligible for those grants for a PSAP is it can only be one PSAP per county, and it has to be designated as that county's designated PSAP, which the board did for PSC in 2017. uh, 2000 through 22. Um, and with that, um, there's also stipulations within that, which we were all the only, the only PSAP eligible ending County for that because we're the only ones, the only PSAP that uses medical protocol that enables us to be able to give CPR instructions over the phone. Um, none of the other PSAPs have that, uh, have that ability. So that automatically takes them out of contention to be, uh, uh, designated PSAP as well as having staff, more than two staff on at one time and having a dedicated training program. So the total grants, like I said, the dollar amounts vary year to year, but they do prohibit personnel like we saw with the, like we talked about with the call logger too. They prohibit maintenance costs and things that they deem will go on. They also can't be used specifically to supplant out of your budget. But if you can prove that it is a, it's something that's necessary and something that you would have budgeted for anyway, then they do allow it. And we have been able to use that quite extensively in the last couple of years. We've used about a million, but we've used a total of a million dollars, $1,120,000 in grant funding. So that's where we've been able to really get some good advantages in looking at newer technologies. And that's where we kind of, it gives us a little bit more freedom to say, okay, this is a technology that look great. It's supposed to be fantastic that RFP wise said, Oh, this is the way to go. And we find out a year later, it's not the way to go. A lot of times vendors out there will tell you what you need. Um, not typically what you need. So, um, so that does give us, give us a little bit of flexibility to be able to tell that what's best for our County, what's best for our center and what has the greatest impact and staff. Next slide. So being the staff, people are kind of surprised when I talk to them and say, yeah, we have 105 total people in the PSC in your 911 center. It's larger than many people think. The bulk of our staff being our communicators, 77 communicators, we built that up significantly, about close to 10 communicator spots over the last few years. To give you an idea, for one phone to be answered 24-7, that requires four total people. So because of the nature of vacation, benefit time, days off, things like that. We have one customer service specialist. And then we get into more of our clerical, our administrative assistant, our clerk three, our IT specialists. We're super fortunate in that we're one of the only departments that have a dedicated IT team within our department. And that's necessary, one, because of the 24-7 need of our operations, as well as some of the specialty of our software, which is a little bit different. Now, we still... still has oversight over us, so we still work very closely with them. 10 communication supervisors. We have one behavioral called version supervisor. This position has been just... And this was... Too bad that Richelle left. She actually secured this position for us about four years ago. And this individual has done fantastic as far as reaching out to a lot of nonprofit groups throughout the county to help us really get more collaborative with those individual groups when it comes to public health and mental health and wellness within the center, as well as acting as a fantastic liaison with the state's 988 system, for suicide prevention as well as overall mental health. So even though we don't currently have a total behavioral health call diversion division, the goal is to get there eventually. This position has been able to kind of fill that by making sure that we're utilizing our community partners really, really well. We have a special projects coordinator, which is specifically set up to setting up right now as working as the primary project coordinator for the new building. It's extensive, and I appreciate his job and what he does to help us out a lot. The managers, we have two operation managers, a tech services manager, a deputy director, and then myself. And I'm sure you're going to hear this from every presentation. But just remember, I'm the first one that could say, I have the best staff. And these individuals, 24-7, I mean, one of our values is selflessness, and they show it constantly. The way that everyone is expected to be available, is available, works the holidays, away from family on a consistent basis. It's not prison. They choose these jobs, and they do so with the utmost desire to want to do good. So I just can't say enough good things about it. Okay, next outline is in the last five years, I came on five years ago as the director. One of the things that we were lacking was a really good internal structure. We had a very vertical structure before. There was no other divisions. It made communication not flow very well at all. So we've divided up into some divisions, which has been able to then allow better communication to flow within staff, as well as being able to address employee needs a lot better than what we were doing prior. So call volume. It's the center of what we do. And one of the really nice things or neat things about the 911 center is everything that we do, the amount of data that we get is amazing. We can tell how long the average is that we spend on a call to how quickly we're able to put that call into dispatch. So being able to look at call volume is actually absolutely essential Because we use that call volume actually annually We break down the call volume in 15 minute increments by day by month for the year so that we can run it through an Erlang B calculation to determine what kind of staffing we need so our staffing is very evidence-based and some of the technologies that we look for are not how can we use technology to eliminate staff, but how can we utilize technology to make staff more effective and more efficient? This is a unique job in that one of the things we shoot for is for an employee, for a staff member to have some downtime between calls. So the goal is to have staff busy 60% to 70% of the time so that the rest of the time they're able to decompress from some of those calls that they do get. One of the things that are really surprising when you look at the call stats are obviously Dane County continues to grow, fastest growing county. Our nine-on-one call volume has been growing since 2020. With the stats there, we can see that there has been Pretty continuous growth. It gets a little bit difficult and skewed once you consider there is that pandemic there in the beginning. So we did have some inconsistencies with our call volume before we started to get normal again. But this really dictates that and shows why we don't reduce our staffing, why our 911 staffing has to continue to, we have to either look at increasing staffing or look at how can we divert some of the other things that are, that are taking some of their times away. So like we look at the non-emergency call volume, non-emergency call volume being about 52 to 53% of our call volume. And not to say that there's not emergency calls that come in within to those non-emergency lines, but for the most part, they are very routine calls, a lot of calls for parking, things like that. So that's where we look at, okay, what can we do to help take some of those calls and divert them away from our 911 call takers so that they can have that time between calls so that we can have availability. Because when you see that accident on the Beltline, You got to remember everyone that's driving by with a cell phone is calling 911. So we will go from one or two active calls to an accident on the belt line, having 20 to 25 calls on hold. And that's what we want. We want people to be able to call because every bit of information we get on that accident is beneficial. Plus with wake accidents that you see typically after another accident, it's very common that they're calling about multiple scenes. Now, what we've seen in our non-emergency call volume is it's actually been dropping. And there's the only thing that we can really, and it's more of a guess than anything to see, okay, why are non-emergency calls dropping? It's just greater accessibility, people using the internet a lot more to find, get the answers to the questions they want. And generationally, People don't necessarily want to talk to someone. I think we're seeing, you know, kind of me and people afterwards seeing they, you know, they want to do things that are different. And that's why we offer things like text to 911 and options like that. It's not our first option. We don't want you to say, okay, I'm going to text instead of call. If you can call, we say call. But if you can't, there's certainly circumstances where it's been beneficial for someone to use 911 or use text to be able to relay information. And then for us to actually use the same technology for that person that calls and says, and it does get through to us, and says, hey, what are the jail visiting hours? For us to give them that information and then say, hey, I can text you that information too so that you have it next time. That helps reduce our overall call volume and we really embrace and wanna make sure that we get a one and done type environment. Because if we can eliminate some of those repeat callers that aren't urgent, overall it's better for the center. Next slide. So seasonal call fluctuations, I really wanted to include this part here because it really kind of shows, it demonstrates how different the call volume flows dependent on time of year. And, you know, there's the old, you know, the robin of spring or whatever, that as soon as you see that it's spring, for us it's call volume. You'll see the first nice days after winter, You'll see our cow volume peak up and then it just keeps climbing throughout the summer. Goes down in winter are the first three months of the year being our lightest. Then summer and then starts ramping down a little bit more dependent on weather for the last part of the year. So one of the challenging aspects of this is. Even though our volume is heavier in the summer, that's also just like any other place, that's when most of our staff wants to take time off. So that drives a lot of challenging aspects and drives a lot of the overtime needs that we have. And next slide. And the reason I talk about summer and seasonality and things like that is because it does impact our overtime. We have a set number of positions that we need to have filled at different parts of the day. And that's where using the previous data, the previous year's data and Erlang B, Use it Erlang B in case you want to know why to use B instead of C. We use B because it takes into account that occupancy rate that we're talking about where we want to maximize the amount of time that we have on staff between calls. And so our industry standard is that we answer 90% of our calls within 15 seconds or less. So to get that, this is the minimum staffing that we have. Now, if we have someone, if we're running really lean staffing, one sick call, is going to require that we order two people because we will order people in four hour increments. We don't, I worked for the state prior to this and we hired, we forced people to work 16 hours of overtime or 16 hour days, eight hours of overtime. We don't do that in our center. The most that we will, the goal we have is 12 hours total, eight hours of primary shift and then four hours of overtime. Or if they're working 12-hour shift, then they're exempt for that particular overtime. Once you get beyond, and studies have shown, once you get beyond that 12 hours, it's really just a person sitting in a seat. It's not someone that's making good decisions. And with these types of calls, we have to have some people that are making good decisions. So our overtime is always going to be substantial based on that. We're fortunate in Dane County that we have great benefits packages, that we have plenty of time off. So what we have to do beyond that is we also have to limit the amount of people that can be off for a particular time of day. So if it's 4th of July weekend and for a day shifter, which is 6.30 to 2.30 p.m., we say we can have two people off for that entire day shift. And you have 15 people that are scheduled. You're going to have people, and it's expected, that are off. going to use their benefit time. So it does force overtime. And it's something that we started looking at seriously five years ago and saying, okay, what can we do? Because we can't overstaff to the point where we don't have overtime. Overtime is necessary to maintain a healthy budget. If you don't have any overtime in a post position, it means you're overstaffed, means you're paying too much. If you don't have enough staff, then staff don't get a work-life balance because they're being ordered over every day for their shifts. Our staff currently work a four-on. The majority of them work four days on, two days off. It's a 37-hour pay period because it's equalized throughout the year. So next slide. So what we started looking at is, how can we make better choices within the center with our scheduling, with our retention, with our training, to be able to make an impact to reduce that overtime? Because it seemed common sense to us. If you reduce a lot of the mandated overtime, you're going to increase your retention. You increase your retention, we're going to gain better knowledge for staff because they're sticking around longer. we're going to be able to give them a better work-life balance. So, and this is where, where staff are just amazing to me that they, we worked on the biggest thing we worked on was what's our culture. Let's define our culture. Let's work on what our culture we want it to be. It, uh, PSAPs and communication centers as a whole aren't typically viewed as very positive. And then the nature of the business itself is one thing. So we really embrace some different opinions and some different ways to work. Trauma-informed care within the center is a big piece of it. So what we started seeing, and there was some stumbling blocks along the way. There was some... We got overly aggressive with changing our staffing and stuff, and it ended up in having to change shifts mid-year, which was very negative for staff, and I lost a lot of credibility, and rightfully so. But we still kept true to the vision, and what we saw is what we're at now, which is When we look at in 2024, where we have almost 6,000 hours in mandated overtime for the year, to where last year we got that down to 1,000. So now for every 1,000 hours of overtime that's taken out from a fiscal point of view, which we're not even looking at this fiscally, but it's a good benefit, is $50,000. So we were able to – the staff were able to reduce this by utilizing each other, by taking advantage of things like trades, by us being able to then increase some of the quotas because some of the – or because the retention was increasing. So that overtime was able to come down naturally. Now, a lot of staff – do count on that overtime. Like I said, we don't want to, we're never going to be to a point to where we'll get rid of overtime. We just want to reduce and as close as we can eliminate that mandated overtime. And that's been, like I said, working with staff and working with 720, with EGR 720, has really worked out for us. When we look at our retention, our retention has continuously got better. We are the only PSAP in the state, one of the few in the country, to be honest, that have continuous retention. full-time staffing. We don't, we aren't in staffing crisis. We can get to a point to where 70 is about the point we get to, to where we're still comfortable. It's a little tight. Once we get below 70, then it becomes intrusive on people, on our staff's lives. So Being able to determine that, working with PP&J two years ago, they hired a consultant to come in and double-check our numbers, work with staff, and they were able to verify that, yeah, you guys are actually on a really good path and you're doing what you need to be doing to get there. So this is a direct result of our staff being professional and wanting to do right for the county and for each other. And part of that with staff wellness is also things that we've committed to them, the county's committed to them. Obviously, our communicators hear a lot of traumatic incidents, lots of really horrible things. And they hear it at a rate that's greater than other first responders. If you're in law enforcement, you may get a horrible call or involvement with something, and then you're out for the rest of the night. Same thing with your firefighter, any of this. With a call taker, you take that horrible incident, and you take a breath, and then you answer the phone, and you might get another one right then and there. So when you consider these communicators, you're taking upwards of 15 to 20 911 calls a night. It's incredibly traumatic. And when we talk about trauma-informed environments and bringing that into our center, one of the things we really looked at is and wanted to pass on the staff is, are you safe? And not are you physically safe, but are you in a safe environment that you can showcase vulnerability? Are you in an environment where you can say freely to anyone, I need help. I don't feel well. I don't, no, I am not okay after that call. Because it was very much that old macho mentality before that, you know, that was like, no, no, no, I'm, I'll just shake it off. I'll walk it off. I'll take a salt pill or whatever, you know. No, it's not. That's not healthy. So we were able to really work closely with FEI or with our EAP program, specifically with one individual on there. that actually sets up critical incident stress debriefs for our fire departments, police departments, things like that, to be able to include our communicators in that. For these really horrific incidents where before police departments and firefighters and EMS got to talk it out with each other, now we're being included in that. So our communicators get some closure through that and some professional help. Then we took it to another level and said, okay, let's do mandatory psychological check-ins for each one of our staff. Once a year, they meet with a psychiatrist from Dane County Psychiatrist. They're not forced to interact with them at all if they want to sit there for 15 minutes and stay silent, that's their prerogative. But what we found is they didn't do that. Staff interacted really well with that. The first year, we had seven individuals, and none of this information is shared with management or anything. It's private between them and the psychiatrist. Obviously, they're a mandated reporter, so if there's something that's there, then that's different. Nothing like that's happened. But we had said that first year we had seven individuals that then committed to long-term therapy that they're still into it that wouldn't have been there before. So this has really contributed a lot to our retention rates and staff really recognizing that we take it seriously when we say our job as managers is to make sure they're okay, is to make sure they're taken care of so that they can take care of our callers. And then we restructured and rolled out our peer support program. So that's going in full swing right now. The old program I felt was a little, the provider wasn't effective. So now it's back up and it's doing great. Next slide. You'll hear, and especially in the next couple of months, I'm not super needy, but you may think so in the next couple of months because if we start going to a new center, I'm going to be coming here asking for more and more technology, just like the phone technology, to fill that center. Some of the things that we'll talk about that I'll talk about that you'll hear frequently for 911 centers that we use is one for us, the Danecom, which is the radio system. is a fancy way of saying it's a VHF system for the county. In the near future, we are going to have to be looking at upgrading that. The state recently is transitioning over to a UHF system, so we want to really be able to have better interoperability. Also, the challenging thing with Dane Come and the radio system is Dane County has a VHF system through Harris. City of Madison has a UHF system through Motorola. So there's not a lot of interoperability there, which poses challenges, especially when you talk about events like Abundant Life and things like that with the communication platforms. So also our maintenance and monitoring is provided by RACOM. We just finished a two-year contract, authorizing a two-year contract. So next year, you'll probably be seeing an RFP to come out for future maintenance of that. telephone system, use the Solicum Guardian. I won't say much about it because we voted on it today, so we know everything about it. The other thing, the other part that makes us a little bit different from other PSAPs in the state is the ESINET. So when you talk about phone technology or ESINET, when you talk about phone technology, a lot of 911 centers throughout the state are still using legacy or kind of the old copper wire for their phone system. The ESI net actually moved it, moves it to a IP based system. So you get a lot more advantages out of that. The clarity of the phone call is much better with the old wire line. So up until two years ago, we had eight phone trucks for our 911 system, which meant if you were the ninth caller, you got a busy signal. You had a busy signal until, and you'd have to call back and do it. Now with the EZNet, we no longer have phone trunks. So we don't have phone trunks, so we don't have to pay for that. Also, the state pays for EZNet, which is a lot cheaper. But when we do have some of those major incidents, you may hold because you're the 20th caller in the queue, but you're not just getting a busy signal. With nothing on it plus we can also use our technology with the the solar compound system To see of the 20 calls that are on hold right now 17 of them are all grouped around this part of the Beltline But this one is over here on this side of the county Let's bump them ahead of it ahead of everyone else so that we can make sure we address their needs. I So lots of good things with the ESI NET. And then the last thing is that for big technology for us is CAD, or Computer Aided Dispatch. So what CAD does is when you call, our communicator is entering your information. Address, everything like that, into this CAD or computer system, and that is then shared with the dispatcher. So the person that takes your 911 call isn't the one that's contacting law enforcement or fire or EMS. That's being done by someone whose sole job is to dispatch. So in real time or near real time, as the person's updating what the caller's telling them, what's going on, what kind of assistance they need, that dispatcher is able to see it. So we're actually able to expedite sending that first responder and being able to give live updates as opposed to one person having to do both, which delays those dispatches significantly. And Central Square is our maintenance provider and has been for a number of years now.

ask if you can do the future building a little bit quicker. Absolutely. I want to give some time for questions and we'll get another presentation.

Future building, that is what it looks like. It is just down from the medical examiner's office. Be next. And then as far as structuring a tour, here's a link. We offer tours 24-7. Things we operate, they're done through our supervisory staff. And essentially the only thing to be aware of is if you do come in for a tour, it is going to be covered by CEJA standards. So there would be no photography and we would need to gather some information from you just to run it through the system and make sure there's no warrants.

And with that, any questions? Thank you so much. So if anybody has any questions, obviously the director is also available via email to answer questions. But if there are any questions that you want to ask tonight, we have another presentation too. And so I don't want to take too much time, but if anybody has any stuff.

I have just one simple question. On your overtime slide, what was going on in 2024 that was such a spike?

So 2024 was where we were down in staffing, and we tried a new staffing program. So the staff, we allowed staff to working with the union working with each other to develop a new staffing system, they went to 10 hour days, it with the downsizing the staffing, it didn't work. So that was part of the consultant coming up and something that we continue to work with the EGR.

Thank you. Sure. I have one quick question. I guess I can go ahead. Yeah, how long does it take to train someone?

So the classroom training, the original training, is four weeks long. And then after that, it takes another four to eight weeks to get signed off on the OJT training. That's done with one of our field officers. They're sitting there with them, monitoring through that. And then after that, it's continuous training to get trained in the dispatch disciplines. So that takes an additional two to four weeks every time they pick up a dispatch discipline.

Thank you.

Any other questions? Thank you so much, Director. Appreciate it. Thank you.

No, it might be that I may not be OK to present anymore tonight. Because I sent, when I sent you the PowerPoint, did I have? I only have the. That's fine. Oh, PDF. Yeah, let's load that. Okay. Are you guys up for it? Yeah, come on up. Need stretches? Just give me one second. I gotta grab it. That'll actually probably even go faster.

Our next presentation of the evening, thank you everybody for your patience. There are a lot, a lot of departments, so I'm glad we were able to get two in this evening. While just pulling up the slide, if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself.

Sure. I'm Agnieszka Rogalska. I'm the chief medical examiner of Dane County. I've been with Dane County since 2014, initially as a medical examiner, a standard run-of-the-mill medical examiner, then became the deputy chief and ultimately the chief in 2022. I'm usually the PowerPoint queen, which is why I said I would bring a flash drive, because it wouldn't otherwise be sent through the Internet. It would never make it. But I do also provide a PDF, which is what we're going to use today. It's the same bells and whistles. So the first slide that you'll see, and I apologize for the delay in that, is basically just our mission statement. It's pretty simple. As you can imagine, we measure our success by different metrics. And we also, although we have a public face, it's not one that most people want to see. We enter people's homes during one of the worst times of their lives, and none of them have invited us there. So our profile is quite small. But that... But that mission statement does sort of belie a lot of the work that goes into it. Next slide. So the next slide is showing you basically the fact that we are statutorily mandated to perform the majority of our functions. This is a medical profession. It is a subset of the medical profession. So we don't necessarily have the same algorithms as they have in the hospitals. We obviously have different outcomes. And also we have a little bit more strict guidelines into what it is that we do. There's significantly more statutes than this, but this is the general oversight. So what is it that we actually do? The role of the coroner and medical examiner essentially is to determine the cause and the manner of death and to investigate as needed in order to make sure that we come to a medically reasonable conclusion as to what happened, how somebody died. Next slide. But in addition to that, what we do has significantly more impact in the community. The numbers that we generate or the cause and manner of death statistics that we generate are used to statistically analyze trends in the United States. This is what grants are made of. So when public health is asking for opioid grants, this is the data that they're getting. In addition to their own or health laboratories, the medical examiner's statistics are also a component of that. Next slide. We also are part of the surveillance of potential infectious diseases or trends. So if we see an uptick, for example, in suicides, that's something that we would identify. The most prominent ones would have been Legionnaire's disease in New York, but also the COVID pandemic was really a homecoming as to what it is that what impact that we have, who our partners truly are outside of us. The majority of our, I would say, end users are the families and the silent partners end up being things like the district attorney's office and then public health. initiatives that we participate in. Next slide. The probably least commonly thought of is the consumer product index reports. So a lot of that information is gathered also from medical examiner's offices. They do have abstractors that come to our office and other coroner's offices in the state and in the country to collect data. The most famous of that when I was a fellow in Minnesota was the child who had eaten a a heart-shaped locket that was being sold with Nike shoes. Some of you may remember that. It was tragic, but they were actually highly lead-lined, and so children were dying as a result of lead poisoning. It didn't take very many children for it to be identified, but the only person that caught that was the medical examiner. Next slide, please. And one of our statutorily mandated federally mandates is for emergency management and response. So we are part of what used to be the EF structures where we had to have these functions for emergency response. And we are integrated into the ICS command systems and also have a responsibility to make sure that we are prepared in some shape or form. for an emergency. Obviously, that's going to look different in a small county than it is in Dane County or Milwaukee County, but it is something that we have to be prepared for and respond to. And finally, one of the most, I think, pleasing aspects of what it is that we do is tissue and organ donation. In addition to hospitals and other medical fields who are mandated reporters, we too are mandated reporters of potential donors. So our investigators are trained in approaching families. We usually... try to get an idea before we talk to the family about the loss of their decedent, about what that person's wishes were. As you know, many people can now register on their driver's license. Some of them can say that they're interested but not actually register. And so we have a process of communicating with family what their loved one would have wanted, and we make sure that we can facilitate that and also provide them factual information about the process. Excellent. Okay, so who are we? The coroner and the medical examiner is essentially just an officer who is either elected like the coroner or appointed as a medical examiner is in order to determine the cause and the manner of death and to sign a death certificate. Unfortunately, in Wisconsin, there's a third category of medical examiners. In some states, the medical examiner, because it has the word medical in there, this is a medical professional, usually a physician. They don't all have to be forensic pathologists. The state of Wisconsin has three categories. We have coroners, lay medical examiners, and physician medical examiners. There are 72 counties in Wisconsin. Only six of them have physician-led medical examiners. And that includes the doctors at the UW who aren't either coroners or medical examiners. They're just forensic pathologists. So if you can imagine, 60-some counties have to find a service to provide autopsies. Many of them go out of state. Some of them come to the medical examiners. We don't have any physician coroners in Wisconsin for those autopsy services. It's also important to note that there are no training requirements either for coroners, medical examiners, or any of the medical legal death investigators. So as a lay medical examiner, nobody really takes this job for the fame or the money. So all of the people that are doing it are dedicated. However, not all of them have the same resources and they don't have that education. So without state-funded and state-supported education for coroners and medical examiners, especially those who are lay individuals, may not have... the knowledge base to make the best decisions. And that's sort of what the NAS report in 2009 identified. It was a review. It was the National Academy of Sciences. They did a review of forensic sciences in general. Respective to the coroner or the medical examiner forensic pathology subsection, they found that really the coroner or lay medical examiner system is not functional, mainly because those individuals are not best prepared or best suited to complete the death certificate to get accurate and timely results onto the cause and the manner of death.

And it's really that disconnect because the whole process.

part of the whole point of the medical examiner system is to identify that cause or manner. But if they're not really trained on how to do that, or they don't have the background medical information, or they don't have access to a physician, that end result is going to be skewed or incorrect. Next slide. So that's why you need a forensic pathologist. And these we can go through quickly. And as early as 2005, Dane County's coroner, John Stanley, recognized that his skill level, although he was a law enforcement veteran for many years and he was exceptionally well-liked as a coroner, he recognized that he didn't have the skill set to meet the burdens of the court. And he certainly couldn't do that as a coroner system. And in order to provide those facilities, Dane County was spending significantly more money to get a medical examiner or a forensic pathologist to do those autopsies. Next slide, please. Unfortunately, he passed in office and the torch was taken up by Ray Wusepka, who... also worked diligently with the county board next slide to ultimately get the public worked with the county boards worked with the county executives and specifically paul rusk who was the pioneer of bringing in in 2011 a physician-led medical examiner system at that time they had also planned to build a new building which i won't talk about too much but that's going to be your tour And we made that a reality. So in 2011, next slide, our friend, our near and dear Dr. Vincent Tranchita, whose birthday it is today, was the first medical examiner, physician medical examiner in Dane County. He came in 2011, had a caseload of about 250 to 300 autopsies a year, which is the national standard allowed for one pathologist. Next slide. And so again, because of the nature of our work, it is closer to being in a doctor's office than it is maybe in a county department. So we do have decedents in our office, obviously not in the office portion, but it's still someplace that is, I would say, not somewhere where we would generally have a tour. So I'm going to give you a pictorial tour. In 2011, we were in the PSB in a three-room, second-floor shack. It was a great office, and we really enjoyed it. But this is kind of what it looked like. This is where we started. We had four investigators, one forensic pathologist, and one administrator. Next slide, please. This was our office and we had a morgue that was three people hands together side to side. So it was a little bit smaller actually than this room where those autopsies were performed. We had a small lab in turquoise blue, I presume from the 1970s, where we did some prep work and maybe wrote our reports and did our dictations. And we also had a cooler that housed eight decedents at a time. We also had a freezer, which doesn't really photograph. Well, there's really nothing else other than a cooler. It looks just like this, only smaller. That was able to house three individuals for long term, five if we used appropriate shelving for our tables. Next slide, please. And that worked really well until we started to grow. And we'll talk a little bit about those transitions. So starting from four investigators, chief, excuse me, a lead investigator, an administrator and a doctor, we've grown into significantly more. We're about 25 to 28 individuals. We have schedules that I'll talk about later that have allowed us to have the investigators own their cases. Pretty much everybody owns their cases. They like that. They have communication with the family. Whoever the family is meeting that first day is the person that they'll be talking until the end and in some cases years after. The investigators still talk to those families. They still call every once in a while and they really enjoy that. We have eight full-time staff now of investigators. We do rely heavily on our LTEs. The reason for that is we have 12 hour shifts, but limited number of shifts during the week. So there is unscheduled time and that's what allows the investigators to do that follow up with the families that they wanted to. We did offer them a change of schedule and that was one thing they did not want to compromise on. They really wanted to maintain that contact. Every pay period they have an additional six or eight hours. I don't remember. We switched that, so I apologize for that. But they have a substantial amount of time that they can work from home, schedule themselves to talk to families because they may not be working the day an autopsy is completed and they have that. We do also enjoy having lots of – I wouldn't say lots, but we have the benefit of having LTEs that support that. So if you imagine a 40-hour week, there's only so many – ways you can put three into that without splitting it in half. So we do have limited term employees that work for us. And much like any other facility that is 24-7, 365, we do have to have absolute confirmation that somebody's going to be there, right? We have to have somebody that we can call in. We can't just say, well, you know, we're not going to respond until the storm is over, right? Because somebody or somebody called in sick, so we don't have an investigator to say. There are times when we do have to say that because we're so busy, we can't respond. But we do need that ability to call in an LTE. As you can imagine, much like public communications, public safety and communications, these have to be highly trained individuals. You can't just send somebody who doesn't have the resources or the knowledge out there and say, no, you just take care. of Mrs. Smith today and it'll be fine. So you'll be hearing that not just from me, but from all of the 24-7-365 operations is that our LTEs are critical because we have to have a certain number in order to, one, make sure that we give them enough to maintain their skill set. There's no point spending nine months training somebody and then only have them there once a month. When I was a resident in medical school, I did that. I worked as an autopsy tech once a month and twice a month I screwed up at that job because you just lose that skill set. that said we we don't rely on them tremendously we do have scheduled time for them and the and the schedule and then we use them for holidays vacations we also enjoy staff many of whom have been with us for decades as long as i have been there or longer and their vacation times and their fmlas if needed and things like that sort of expand and so the the ltes give us the flexibility to provide And education and opportunities for those that are interested, some of whom do not want to have a full-time job. And some of them who also work in the other county that we work with, with an IGA agreement. So we give them that full-time job. They need that. They're great investigators. They need that foot in the door to become a full-time investigator somewhere else. But at the same time, we also guarantee them that time we can pull them in whenever. Next slide. Okay, so how does this generally work? And hopefully you have a copy of this and you can kind of go through the flowchart so I won't spend too much time. But what happens if somebody calls our office? This can be a phone call that's answered by clerical staff up front, and it's usually those are nurses or hospitals or hospice agencies calling, I need to speak to an investigator to report a death. We can also be called by Director Bixler and some of his staff to say, hey, you're being dispatched to this location. We need a 9100 unit. At that time, the investigators are the ones who will become incident commander. If you're kind of familiar with that, they decide what happens. They will triage this case to determine if a response is required. They will identify whether there's medical information or family history or other information that they can gather about the case as much as they can before they go. Many cases can be resolved. In fact, most of them can be on the phone without us requiring a response. Somebody who is passing in hospice doesn't need to come in for an autopsy, even if they did have an accident, as long as it's well documented and we can explain the events and it's reasonable. Hospitals, you know, I mean, a hospital is, they have a cancer ward and they have hospices themselves. We can't take every patient. So those are the ones that might have a flag saying, And we will consider. They also take calls about organ procurement agencies who are mandatorily required to report to us that they are interested in something like that. So I would say the majority of cases are reserved by a call. The rest requires a scene response. Once the investigator is on scene, again, they are the incident commander. We have very good relationships with our law enforcement partners, and they basically stand back and let the investigator do what they need to do. They talk to the family. They perform a full body examination. From beginning to end, a scene takes about three hours. When I say that they're incident commanders, I do mean that they are incident commanders. They have at their fingertips a cell phone that can reach any doctor or administrator at any time of the day. The doctors and administration are on call 24-7, 365. Somebody is always there at the end of the phone to provide guidance and to potentially respond. When my investigators call, I listen. And when they say that they have a spider sense, I will go out and take a look. We generally respond to as many true homicides as we do to suspected homicides. That's what you want. You want somebody with a skill set to be able to recognize their limitations. And the doctor is the tool in their toolkit, right? We have such good staff, it would be senseless for us to send them out there alone and then just deal with it at 8 o'clock in the morning and say, you should have done this. So that's one thing that we don't do in Dane County. We do have doctors available for the investigators as well. The investigators also have access to medical records through some of the hospitals through Epic, or they will try to find medical records or get some confirmation from family. And then if they feel that they have enough information on the scene or with the history provided that this appears to be a medical death that is not within our jurisdiction, they can release that individual basically to the funeral home of the family's choice, or we will take them into our care if they do not have a funeral home yet chosen. um some people unfortunately do have to come in for an examination next slide And that comes in a couple of different options. Really what we're talking about is some cases might just require an external examination. So this is a case where the doctor didn't need to come out in the middle of the night to take a look at it, but the investigator would like a doctor to take eyes on the individual or x-rays or some other radiographic technology or some of the toxicology testing. Something else that we have in the lab that we can't take to the scene would be required in order to resolve that issue. So they come in for an external exam. or an autopsy, which is the gold standard for the medical examiner's office. So an autopsy is an external examination plus an internal examination of the organs in order to document these findings, both for the determination of the cause and manner of death and sometimes for the purposes of the court. Next slide, please. And after that, after the autopsy is performed, then it goes back again into a family-centered function. Our investigators will relay the information to law enforcement, but also to the families. And that's when they start the process of helping them through the next steps. We guide them through potentially getting the death certificates. Very often we handle... We don't handle the paperwork, but we do guide families on how to get assistance for burials, how to get their documents, like bank statements, get accounts closed. If you think about how many email addresses you have and how many of those passwords you remember, think about having to figure out what somebody else's passwords are, right? So that's where the kind of more social work aspect of investigative work begins. Next slide, please. And finally, reunification. This usually happens immediately after an examination if needed or as soon as the family chooses a funeral home. However, we do have a substantial amount of unclaimed remains. And this is an instance in which the family, they're either estranged or we can't find a family or they don't have the resources. For some reason, they are not able to take the loved one into their care for final disposition. The last time I gave this presentation in 2024, we had three individuals who we didn't even know where they were. Not only were they unclaimed, but they were completely unknown. Despite various technologies, including DNA and investigations, none of that was feasible because DNA works best if you have something to compare it to. And there's nothing like that for most people. But using familial DNA, new techniques, we've been able to identify all three of those individuals. And the last unclaimed decedent was identified. You may have seen the news report. He was found in a chimney many years ago, decades ago. He was finally identified and reunited with his family this year. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is just a short story of everything since I came, since 2011, until things kind of started to change. So when Dr. Tranquita came here, it was expected that with a physician overseeing it, you'd see an increase in the number of autopsies because you didn't have to send them out. There wasn't a budgetary issue. You already had the guy. You just had to provide him with the autopsy to do. And so the numbers slowly grew. However, they grew substantially faster than was expected. This is the beginning of the creep of the opioid pandemic. In 2015, we also took on Rock County through an intergovernmental agreement. Remember, I said there's 72 counties and only six places, and six places is as of this year. At that time, there were only four places that had physicians where you could have autopsies performed. And so it's impossible for a small county to create their own medical examiner system. The cost isn't there. The support of the community just isn't there. It's generally centered around large, large cities. But one of the things that you can do other than just doing somebody's autopsy and not having any contact with it is through an intergovernmental agreement. So at this point, we sort of took over, as one way of saying it, Rock County, where Dr. Tranchita was the chief medical examiner. Now I'm the chief medical examiner of Rock County as well. And we oversee that office. They have their own administration, their own budget, their own death investigators. But the medical portion of it and the administration is provided from the physician-led office, and we perform their autopsies. We did also have some variation in staffing. We were also approached by Brown County by the end of 2015, and Dane County began recruiting for a Brown County office. The idea there was that we would train this individual. It's also very difficult to have just one doctor because then that doctor can't take vacations, weekends. What do you do? What if they're sick? And so the goal was for Dane County to train, recruit, and provide support for that individual. And then ultimately, if Brown County grew to the point where they could hire a second pathologist for when they did, then they would sever. At this point, the growth was so fast and partly limited by the size of our office. If you can only house eight decedents, but you're doing 650 autopsies a year, you have to be able to reunify families very quickly. We also had no donation suite. And so anybody who is going to be a donor, there's a limited time frame for that. They have to be within a cooler within 12 hours, which means you have to have room. and they also have to have the procedure done within 24 hours. So at this time when I joined in 2014, the doctors were working somewhere between 54 to 115 hours a week because we had to come in overnight in order to get external examinations done. We also had to move bodies really quickly. The morgue techs were also staying sometimes fairly late, sometimes until eight, nine o'clock at night, just to move, get people reunited with their families and to meet the criteria. We can skip this, next one. I already talked about this and then Brown County as well. So we saw substantial growth and in county, in any kind of government business, you have to have the money, right? You can't just create a new population. So revenue generating offices like ourselves, we understand that first you have to show the need and show how you're gonna fund it. And that does mean that you're gonna grow, which is one of the reasons we did continue to move into Rock County and Brown County so that we had the funding. Because then we had the funding to visualize the dream that John Stanley had. Next slide. We had the funding to hire another doctor, but we also had the funding to finally move into the new building. Next slide, please. So in 2017, we actually, August 28th of 2017, we came to this new building in Ludd's Lane, which is across the street from, well... It's across the street from the landfill, but we generally tell people it's across the street from the Yahara Golf Course, which it is. We're kitty-cornered to both.

I don't mind the landfill.

I think it's nice. I've said that before. Yes, they burn off the methane, but that methane is going to CNG to power our vehicles. They do also scent, or at least they used to scent the off-gassing, and grape day is a very particular favorite for everybody. It smells like grape jelly outside. We do have an abundance of white life. We have, we have, what are those annoying birds? Well, we have tons of those, yes. But we have the, they're not actually, the cranes. So we do have cranes that come in, the Sandhill cranes, I think, yes, that come and mate every year in the same spot. You know, they'll come and peck at your window because they don't know what's going on. So there's lots of excitement for us. People say it like it's a bad thing, but yeah, we're next to the landfill. We like it. Okay, and here's your virtual tour. So when you come into our building, you would be coming through the front-facing office. This has been carefully designed for the safety of our staff, so there are safety protocols that are in place here that I won't go into great detail here, but I can talk about it if anybody wanted to know about it. So this isn't just your standard office. This is with the intention that we are very remote, with the exception of the building that's going to be coming up. We really had nobody there. The deputies would come and... pump gas at the stations that are out there, but that's about it. You'd still have to have a response. So we're also an enclosed facility. We're a gated facility and security is tightly controlled. We have significantly more office space now. On the top, you'll see our conference room. This was intended to be a means for us to communicate with outside counties, potentially do consultations virtually with other offices, teach our staff, have our own internal training, but it's also a command center. At the time that this was built, this was one of the highest security buildings in Dane County. And so we also were an alternate command center if needed. So we have multiple stations here for computers. There's wires that will drop down. You can see that we had Internet access, which I know after COVID is probably like, what do you mean you were Zooming? Yeah, but that was a big thing back then. We didn't in the old days. We didn't have Zoom. You just had to call people. Right. That was all relatively new technology. So to be able to have that was a feather in our cap. Next slide, please. We do also have offices. We had enough offices for our four investigators with overflow of cubicles. The cubicles are also designed so that the investigators have situational awareness. So it's just high enough so that they don't see their person. But if they just sit up a little bit, they'd be able to see all around. Again, they have eyes on the building at all times and camera systems as well. Unfortunately, almost immediately after we moved in, we had outgrown our space. Our number of investigators was very graciously increased from four to eight because that was the requirement. We needed two investigators on every 12-hour shift. One investigator was just not enough. The delay to law enforcement responses was significant. We couldn't meet those burdens. And the last thing you want is... You know, to save some money in your department for another department, in this case, law enforcement, to go into overtime because they have a deputy waiting for four hours. Right. So it was really much more efficient for everybody if we just went to those eight investigators. So we do we have a mix of offices and cubicles as well. But most importantly, next slide. We have this, a state-of-the-art autopsy facility. So we have three stations, one of which is an isolation suite that we can close down when we did have. This is where our COVID cases are done and were done. Also, if we had a meningitis case or something, we are a biosafety level three, which means we can handle those cases. We could not do Ebola or anthrax or anything like that, but we hope that we never do. This allows multiple doctors to be working at the same time. We also have a donation suite in another side of the building that's completely separate so that we don't have to come in. It does happen because we prefer to do an external examination before donation because skin is very big. tissue and it is a tissue that they collect it has multiple uses along with bones so we want to see any scars marks tattoos any injuries any potential you know injection marks things that we might need to determine the cause and the manner of death or to provide that for the court as evidence we want to see that however You know, from that 115 hours or coming in several times a week to do externals, I would say I've come in maybe several times a year and rarely at three in the morning. I might come in at eight or nine at night now to facilitate that or come in early at five o'clock or six o'clock in the morning just because they have their own suite. Next slide, please. We also, I know that Supervisor Trucios, you were interested in emergency response and surge. We'll talk about surge later, but emergency response. So in the days of John Stanley, he used a grant funded program to start Dane First, which is a fatality incident response team. This is non-staff funded. It was basically a trailer with stuff. This was after 9-11. So it's a trailer filled with things that you could use and we could deploy to another county. It was state funded. It continues essentially to be a state funded asset, which we do house. We have trailers, refrigerated trailers that we can provide to a county that might need it. It was Ashland County, I think, who many years ago had a motor vehicle accident on the highway when it was like minus 40 degrees and they backed up to 100 cars. So fortunately, they didn't have fatalities, but it was expected that there would be some fatalities. So those are the types of things where we would say, you know, those counties, many counties, even Brown County, when we got there, they didn't have a cooler between them. So they, other than the hospital, they didn't have anywhere to store a decedent if the autopsies were to back up. So we do houses in our office. Next slide, please. Unfortunately, even in 27 and 2018, it still wasn't enough. Next slide, please. Now we have five counties, but we still only have two doctors. We did hire somebody for Brown County. The building wasn't ready in their time frame. It wasn't a good fit. So on some of the lines, if you're reviewing this at home because you have nothing better to do, you might see that there are like fractions of doctors on there. So we did have a revolving door of doctors. There was a lot of turnaround for physicians. Right now, the need for physician is so great. There are more black rhinos than there are forensic pathologists in the world. We only have about 300 or 350 of us in the entire country. We need about 2,500 to fill all the positions that are available. And so competition is very steep. You have to provide... the things that people want, because not only does the grass seem greener on the other side, in many instances it is greener. I would say that for the most part, we're happy with the people who stay because they're 150 percenters, right? I said nobody goes into this for love of fame or money. And we do have extremely dedicated staff, so we're very protective of keeping them when we get them. In 2017, the opioid pandemic hit. So although we had calculated that we had enough doctors and we had for the amount of autopsies that we're taking, nobody could have foreseen the number of cases that were going to be coming in. Nobody also could foresee the COVID pandemic. So by the time that we were in 2020, in the summer of 2020, we had absolutely hit a crisis mode. We only had two full-time pathologists, which was myself and Dr. Tranquita, who were there throughout the entirety of 2022, or for 2020. And the situation was such that if we did not go into our continuity of operations plan, we could not reunify families with their decedents in a timely manner for viewings to be possible. Our delay between death and autopsy was rising to about five days. And then our hours also were skyrocketing. There were days that we were getting 37 calls in a 24 hour period for one doctor. We're at about a thousand autopsies a year by the time we hit 2020 with COVID and 21 and 22. essentially for two doctors, maybe an LTE doctor or somebody who's there for part of the year. That ability for work-life balance is very important in this profession. And it becomes, unfortunately, it is a leveraging point when you have your choice of 2,500 other offices. So at that point, we had to go into our continuity of operations plan. We also had short staff administration and some of our investigators. We relied heavily on LTEs. There are a lot more of them. The admin stuff, which just had to be shared between everybody. And in terms of doctors, we just had to, I wouldn't say cut corners, but we had to make some very hard decisions about what was and what wasn't going to be done anymore. So although the gold standard is to perform an autopsy on any non-natural death, the national standard at this point was starting to go into external examination only because nobody had the staff to handle these kinds of surges. And we did that too. We were fortunate enough, however, that we began our continuity of operations planning in January of 2020, long before anybody else had thought about it. We had already started stockpiling millions of gloves and aprons and things so that we could provide that to Dane County by the time it came. We were some of the few places that actually had supplies to give. And so it was easy for us to implement it. What that meant, however, was that our autopsy numbers Our true autopsy numbers dropped at half, but we increased the number of cases that we were doing just on external examination. Next slide, please. And one of our great saviors was the grant-funded purchase of this portable CT device. It was relatively new on the market. The company was looking to get it out. It's actually a good company, and we were able to get it. It is a rolling donut of radiology. This is what they use to... Well, everybody thought it is going to be used, and it is. If you've ever seen a CT machine, much like pathologists, it's almost always kept in the basement of any hospital. Not for the same reasons. Nobody wants to meet a pathologist. Everybody wants to meet a CT scanner, but they're so ridiculously heavy. They're millions, thousands of pounds, tons. You need cranes to move them, the big blue cranes. So they're always in the basement. So that's very inconvenient if you're in the emergency room because your patient has to be stable enough to get into a CT. So this technology of mobile CTs, which when I was in medical school, we used to laugh at the medical students when they asked, could the CT come to us? And yeah, for radiologists and pathologists, there's an enormous market for that humor. But they created this portable CT device, you know, like a rolling donut. And last year we just completed the building so that we could actually have a separate place to house it. So this allowed us to do it because now I have a machine that will tell me what's inside the body. I don't have to open the decedent up. It's still not nationally recognized as a gold standard. And that's a problem because it is becoming a problem for the court. It was one thing when this is what we were doing to mitigate affairs in 2221. 23 even in COVID, but now the standards want to return to full autopsies. Next slide, please. And so this slide is kind of showing you, again, by 2022, when Dr. Tranchita retired, he was coming back part of the time, but I was the only staff pathologist, and I had about 1,000 autopsies a year mitigated by the use of this technology. Now, Brown County dropped off, but we do truly value our relationship with Rock County, not only because it does support our staffing financially, fiscally. You saw what our GPR was, and being able to perform these autopsies does it. But they're just really good partners, right? And they need it. And one of the missions that we always had was to provide forensic medical legal death investigation and forensic medicine to anybody who asked for it. We are now in a good position, we hired Dr. Taylor as the deputy medical examiner and recently this year you approved her position as deputy chief and we have one other doctor that's coming in November and we have one part-time that's LTE right now. However, this still is below the standards and we still cannot get out of our continuity of operations because the numbers that we would be doing per person not only exceeds the national standards, it's starting to exceed our physical abilities. So this is a slide that kind of divides what it is that we do by job in terms of what's physical and kind of what's intellectual. I would say that the investigators, half of their job is physical. They are out there examining bodies, responding to scenes, and half of it is intellectual and emotional. They are working with the families, essentially as social workers. Morgue techs probably do a lot more physical, right? They're the ones that are assisting us at the autopsy. And maybe they're doing more intellectual work like counting pills, doing inventory and things like that, but the majority of their job is physical. The doctors are a little bit... close to half and half, I would say 40, 60. A lot of what we do is intellectual because a lot of it is what we do is after hours on call. And as that expands, the next slide, It's silly to think that it only brushes off on some of us, right? So if the doctors are getting backlogged, which we are, that falls back on the investigators because now they have more families calling, asking for reports. They're calling to find out about their final, not the disposition, but the diagnosis. It means that the morgue techs have to work a faster pace with the few doctors that are there. It means that they're getting more phone calls and more filing. And unfortunately, it does spread everywhere. So we're not at 115 hours a week for the doctors. We are able, like I said, for the most part to mitigate with the investigators. We are short-staffed in some areas, but at least people are able to still take vacations at this time. I'm going to plug it just like everybody else you're going to hear, right? The hiring freeze is difficult for us, especially as not emergency responders, but we are mandatory kind of responders. And also as 24-7, 365 operations, we rely heavily on that. And so we are all happy to partake in the hiring freeze, right? I said we're all 150 percenters. The staff need 100 percent to do their job and 50 percent to be able to handle it. And everybody loves their job. One of the things that everybody says is, or I've actually heard this say, is I don't mind if I have to stay, you know, three hours overtime because I know that what I'm doing makes an impact to the family. You can't buy that. But at the same time, you have to be reasonable about what the impacts of that are. You can't abuse it. Next slide, please. So the consequences of it include overtime. We do see fluctuations in that, so I can't say, but the trend is always upwards. That's just something that you're going to expect, and I don't think it'll be mitigated. I think that we are in a good place in terms of investigators, but I think in terms of the doctors and potentially the morgue staff, we are starting to see some struggles. And for budgetary reasons, the biggest impact is our autopsy revenue. We fund 3 million of our 5 million budget ourselves. And we have lost about nine counties who used to come to us before 2016, mainly because of our backlog. They just couldn't get reports in a timely fashion. It also impacts our partners. Public health, we're not... doing the best that we could in terms of coming to fatality review committees just because we don't have the staffing. We're not in a position to provide them with statistics. So they come and have abstractors who gather those statistics from our office. But we can't generate, for example, a yearly report that I could showcase and keep you here for another half hour if you so ask me to on a Tuesday night. We talked about the fact that this impact this has on the criminal justice system is that it could be a delay in determining the cause and the manner of death. And it really delays the family. So in 22, between 22 and 24, once we actually got to three doctor staffing, which is our minimum to tread water, it took me two years to complete all the reports. Technically by our coup policy, I should have gone to our lowest stage, which is what would happen if all the doctors died of COVID and there was one left. which really was a reality at the beginning, nobody knew. We really didn't know what was going to happen. Nobody gets an autopsy except for homicides and maybe infants and no reports. If we hadn't gone to that critical level of code red, as we call it, there's no way we would have gotten back. There's no way. Those reports would just never exist. It would have taken years to do. And so with the assistance of the very mighty morgue techs and the investigators as well, who really reduced all the call volumes to the doctors, helped train each other, and then just sort of supported me through those years, we were able to stay in our stage two, which is where we are again now. But again, that has some impact onto the court. At least we have some reports. But they're starting to get some questions like, why are we not going back to full autopsies? And we just might have to do that and push through. Next slide, please. The biggest consequences, though, is employee burnout. And the ability, I would say, to lose self-assessment skills. You don't know when you're tired or overwhelmed that you're tired and overwhelmed. You just can't see it. Other people can see it. So we have a very robust review process. It took me two years to complete reports. It took administration another two years to complete those same reports because they come and review. They find mistakes. I identify them, correct them, and so on and so forth. And they're tired too. And it's that sort of emotional, just knowing that there's a pile of work that hasn't been completed. So we've cleared all that and we're moving forward. My concern is that we're going to normalize this two-doctor, three-doctor process, and that we're not going to be able to move past that, which is I think my greatest concern. So we're hoping that everything, you know, we've got our fingers crossed for the budget. We can make some revenue and we hope to recruit good candidates. We are getting to the position where people are respecting it. The LTE doctor that we've hired is very nationally acclaimed pathologist who is doing this as a large part has come here just as a favor, a personal favor. And he's spreading the word out there about what he thinks about Dane County. And we think that that'll be helpful in the future to get us to normalize. And we're losing revenue, right? We lost those nine counties. We only have two that stayed with us out of all those counties that used to come here. So we are potentially a service that can fund itself more greatly. The ideal was that we would be able to even give back to the county. I don't know if that'll ever be true, but that is what we would love to be able to do to take that burden off. But that, I don't foresee that anytime in the next year or two, let's just say in the short future. In the distant future, we'd like to become accredited because we don't have national accreditation by the credentialing body. We'd like to become a teaching center. We'd like to take care of ourselves first so that we can provide robust policies and training protocols for our staff and also to provide in-house training, not just to ourselves, but to our partner agencies, right? There are no statutorily mandated training requirements. There are some conferences you can go to. But now with this Zoom technology and the internets, right, we can actually provide that at no cost or a low cost or some sort of supplemented, you know, grant funded cost to all the 60 some other counties that don't have that. And we could potentially consider growth. Once we do grow, I think the county will will grow with us. And that's that's our long term goal. And with that, we're not going to talk about time. Just to come back to our mission statement again, the goal is to do the best that we simply put, and this is how we teach, is you're going to do the highest standard of medical legal death investigation every case, every time. And we will provide you with whatever it is that you need in order to do that. And I think that it's a credit to Dane County that that is seen from outside, from other counties, from other states nationally, from our investigators and all of our staff inside. And You know, Louis was the first to say he has the best employees in the world, but he doesn't get to own that. And I think you will hear that. I mean, really, we do have people who have been with us for decades and we hope they stay for all of their careers because our metric is, unfortunately, not how many people we save, but how good you feel at the end of the day when you come home. And that's a metric that we can satisfy PIT pretty much every single day. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Are there... Just for the rapidity of... Are there questions?

Can I ask a short one? Just out of curiosity, the reference to the task of counting pills and managing medications, understanding fluids are a thing, but who are the pills for?

So it's illegal in the state of Wisconsin to have prescription medication that belonged to another individual. So if you are living with somebody who had a medicine cabinet filled with medications, you technically shouldn't legally have them. At the same time, there's a limited ability to dispose of them. Law enforcement can't take all of them. We have an entire evidence room devoted just to this. And we have millions of pills. And then we work with the drug monitoring program to dispose of them. We may also need them to determine the cause and the manner of death. So there are cases where the toxicology is equivocal. It's kind of high, but is it really, is it suicide high? Should I be concerned? Is it intoxication high? Or are they just a poor metabolism? Did they take their dose shortly before they died so the levels might be elevated? So those pill counts are very helpful to us. So the biggest concern is for the cause and manner of death, and this is why statutorily we feel we have the right to collect them, but then it's also to dispose of them appropriately through the drug monitoring program. Thank you. You're welcome.

Other questions? Thank you so much.

You're very welcome. Sorry to keep you.

Thank you for staying. Thank you.

You're welcome.

To finish up our agenda, our future meeting items and dates, our next meeting is June 9th and then June 30th. To let everybody know... The additional presentations in front of us for our upcoming meetings, we still have the DA's office, Pretrial Services, Office of Justice Reform, Family Court, Juvenile Court, Clerk of Courts, Corporation Counsel, Emergency Management, I think I want to get in somebody to talk about the claims process. So we have a lot more presentations. I'm happy to get, if you want to send me feedback on what you'd like to see, possibly different from what you've seen this evening. I think our presenters this evening did a fantastic job of filling our requests. But if there's anything you want to see different, I probably am going to do three at the next one. But my hope was to get all these presentations done in three meetings. That's not happening. I don't want to hold this here till 11 o'clock. And at some point, obviously, you're just not going to retain stuff after a certain hour. So this will just be spread out over the course of our next few meetings. But if you have any feedback on what you want to see based on this, I think the one thing that I definitely saw today that in general is like, I want people to remember abbreviations and that was my fault for not reviewing the slides better and finding abbreviations and remembering whether or not everybody knew abbreviations. So that would be the only note I have from tonight. But if you have feedback just send me a note and I'll make sure that future presentations include that. Any other items besides the presentations that we're going to see? Obviously we'll get referrals. Any other thoughts about future meetings at this point?

That was great. Is the sheriff on that list, too? The sheriff?

Absolutely. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, that's because he's already been scheduled. But you're absolutely right for calling that out. Yes, the sheriff is absolutely on the list. My apologies. The sheriff will not be at our next meeting. He'll be at the 30th. He picked June 30th. So thank you for catching that. But, yeah, he picked the 30th. Okay, great. So next item would be public comment on items on the agenda. We do not have that. And then such other business as allowed by law.

Was Supervisor Yang, was she not here? She let us know that she wasn't going to be. Oh, okay, because she's usually just when you do the rolls.

And I would entertain a motion. I move. So moved. All right, I have a motion for adjournment. Have a good evening, everybody. Thank you so much.