Homeless Issues Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everybody. I'm going to call this meeting of the Public Protection Judiciary Committee to order if staff can call the roll. Chair Furman. Present. Furman, present.

Supervisor Gray.

Gray, present.

Gray, here. Supervisor Larson. Larson, present. Larson, here. Supervisor Lewis. Lewis, present. Lewis, present. Supervisor Trucios. Trucios, present. Trucios, present. Supervisor Veldren. Here. Veldren, here. Supervisor Yang.

Yang, here.

here. And then I don't see any YGP members. Chair, we have a quorum. Great. Thank you so much.

Didn't they just finish? I think they did.

I think they did. The next item on our agenda will be consideration of the minutes. Can I get a motion for that? So moved. Thank you. Is there any discussion, questions, corrections of the minutes? Not seeing any, I'm going to assume approval by unanimous consent and move on to referrals on our agenda for this evening. First referral being 2026, Resolution 036, authorizing a contract for Audrelin voice assistant platform. We have registered speakers wishing to speak, and so we'll start with that. Our first registered speaker for that item is Hannah Thompson, and I believe she is here in person. Come on up. Welcome, you have five minutes.

Thank you. I promise I won't need all of that on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. My name is Hannah Thomas. I'm a steward over at 911. I am not speaking on behalf of my department, but I am speaking as a member of 720 and also a steward from 720. I come in front of you today to express the sentiment of the majority of the communicators that work at the Public Safety Communication Center in regards to the specific contract in front of you. Obviously, it's a very nuanced and sometimes controversial topic whenever somebody mentions AI integration into the workforce in any capacity. And so when I reached out to communicators, I did receive about 56% of the total population who responded back to me about their concerns or support of this particular product. 38%, which is percent of the 56% who responded, not the total population. But 38% were clearly very opposed to the idea of any IAI integration. When asked about that, essentially, they do not like the idea of it in any capacity. But when we move on to the next group, which was 35% of the surveyed who responded, they had some real concerns but were not outright opposed. And that's why I'm speaking in front of you today. I believe that there's some common ground that we can find between management and the communicators on the floor. I do want to preface before I get into the common ground. We have a very good working relationship with our current department managers. And it's part of the reason I'm in front of you today is I feel like we already are working towards the goals that I'm going to state. That being said, we recognize as well that the current manager or director or supervisor that agrees with us may not always fill that role. And so it's our hope that we can continue in whatever capacity you hopefully agree with today to ensure that no matter who's sitting in those chairs, we are still addressing the communicator concerns. It came down to three particular columns that these people said that they would be more confident moving forward with. One was the liability aspect. When we're talking about an AI agent being integrated into the department, how do we ensure that we aren't going to end up blaming a human for something that the AI agent actually was responsible for? The reason we believe that there is a liability concern is Right now, the call flow, as stated, would be a non-emergency call rings in, the AI agent answers, processes information, and then at a later time after that call is disconnected, we need to provide quality assurance. And this is desired on all levels. We want to make sure that it's working as intended. But within the timeframe that the AI agent hangs up and the time that a communicator may review this information, is there liability within that space? And so we just want to make sure that we're not going to be blamed if this AI does make any mistakes in handling what should hopefully be only non-emergency calls. However, we do take emergency calls on non-E. And so we want to make sure that those are not falling through the cracks. The second position that some people raised concerns about was just the jobs aspect. Whenever we're talking about taking a percentage of the job away from them, we want to make sure that we're not also talking about job elimination. We view this as a potential tool to be utilized to help make our job easier. And we just want to make sure that we're in some way respecting the fact that these communicators clearly provide value to the county, no matter non-emergency or emergency calls that they're taking. The third aspect was just performance related, and they wanted to make sure that the system is correctly working. And part of that was allowing communicators to be providing feedback as to how the system operates, but also being provided with mandatory training so that they're having a say, but also a complete understanding of how this product is operating. I've spoken with our director. You will be hearing from him later. I am so sorry I have to go before him. But I think that for the most part, we are in agreement on these measures. The reason why we want them to go forward, despite our current director agreeing with them, is we want to ensure that whoever is the director in the future also values the same values we have now. I don't want to say that the whole of the department is not excited about this feature. There is some people who are extremely excited about it. 16% were completely supportive of it. But there's also an 11% that had no opinion, and that's partially because they didn't have real exposure to the product yet. I'm certainly willing to talk about any of the numbers or opinions I've mentioned in front of you, but there's language that I believe that Derek Wallace will also be speaking further to that essentially we're hoping will address some of these concerns so that the communicators feel more confident in utilizing this product in the future.

Thank you. Thank you. Any questions for this registrant? Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker on this item is Anthony Olson, who I believe is available via Zoom.

Promoting Anthony now.

Thank you, Stephanie.

I'm just checking in here. Can you hear me okay?

We can, Anthony. Welcome. You have five minutes.

Thank you. I'll try to shorten my presentation. Members of the committee, thank you for taking public feedback on the Aurelian AI Attendant Proposal. My name is Anthony Olson. I'll be soon starting my 13th year with Dane County 911. I am a 911 and non-emergency call taker, law fire EMS dispatcher, a training officer, and formerly a quality assurance specialist. The following is my personal opinions and observations. It's not to be viewed as opinions or policies of Dane County Public Safety Communications. I do respect any opposing views from my management. In my time as a 911 operator, I have handled a vast number of situations called in on the non-emergency line that were anything but non-emergencies. The term non-emergency is a misnomer. It is simply the first point of contact for citizens that are trying to reach their local government A grandma will call Nani with chest pain because she doesn't, quote, want to bother us. An assault victim will call Nani asking to speak to the original officer, only for us to discover they are calling because the suspect is currently back right outside their door. Here's an example from personal experience, leaving the information vague in order to protect privacies. A female calls Nani, presents as very distracted. She's speaking fast, lots of background. She makes a quick comment about having some suicidal thoughts and frantically asking for someone to come take her baby. She proceeds to put the phone down, arguing with someone in the background. Luckily, we had caller ID, phone number history, and were able to get a response started based on a previous address. Responders arrived to find the original caller has gone, taking her infant with her after making disturbing homicidal comments toward the baby. This all triggered a large police search and phone pings to find her location, and this all began with a non-emergency call. While Aurelian would have forwarded this call to an operator and the original audio would have been available, It would have introduced an unnecessary delay in getting help started, and I am skeptical of what our caller would have reported if faced with an AI attendant instead of a compassionate human. There are numerous ways we could streamline our non-e-call handling process and improve an existing phone tree to better divert callers who don't truly need to speak with Dane County Communications We receive a tremendous amount of calls from the jail, Madison police, sheriff records, legal questions. An updated phone tree could relieve some of this burden without replacing our call taking jobs with AI. The 911 center could also benefit from a renewed focus on putting non-E calls on hold while awaiting additional 911 calls. Training phone tree changes can solve many of these problems without an expensive AI system and its associated liability, especially in this current time of budget crisis and deficits. I understand that within the Aurelian system, phone audio will be recorded and available for our operators to review while we monitor this, quote, automatic system. Even so, we are introducing a substantial non-human barrier and a time delay from when our callers first connect to the time they engage with AI to the time a human reviews the case and determines if a computer did its job right. This is the definition of supervision and quality assurance. Recently, our quality assurance team was reclassified at a higher pay level than our communicators who are currently in the trenches doing the hard work. And now we are being asked to verify and monitor an AI bot for a no additional compensation. An AI bot that is not beholden to any consequences for its failures. A bot named Aurelian, which has Orwellian settings such as resistance levels that fight back against human callers who simply want to speak to another human being. But it's not about compensation. It's about compassion and public safety. I would be much more comfortable with this system if it were utilized similar to Madison Police Self-Report. where a human first triages the call, decides if it is or is not an emergency, and if appropriate, could transfer the call to Aurelian, which could free up our communicators for additional calls. Our human brains are expertly suited at communication, and we do a much better job of analyzing the first moments of a phone call to determine severity and proper routing In closing, taking less phone calls each day sounds like a tempting easy path, but the results of dealing with high intensity emergencies all day concerns me in respect to increased burnout and stress of our operators. Answering the public's questions on the non-E lines is a rewarding way to interact with our citizens, helps break up the day, let our adrenaline and cortisol levels come down in between taking emergencies, I ask that the committee carefully consider the secondary order effects of this potential major change in our call handling process. I thank you for your time, your commitment to public safety in Dane County. I'd be happy to answer any questions from the committee at this time.

Thank you, Anthony. Are there any questions for Anthony? Not seeing any. Our last registrant is Derek Wallace, and he is here in person. Welcome, Derek.

Yeah, I don't really have prepared remarks, I guess. So I just want to thank both Anthony and for Hannah for speaking tonight. Hannah in particular was on leave on vacation out of town this week and or this past weekend. And so she did a lot of work. reaching out to her fellow colleagues, her fellow members, union members, and trying to gauge their opinion. And clearly, you know, with Anthony, that's always difficult to, you know, potentially be speaking in contrast to management's potential position and raising those concerns. So I just want to thank him for offering that perspective too. So, yes, you know, Anthony was going to say something. I said that Aurelian sounds a little too Orwellian. The verbiage there is a little bit similar for my taste. But in any sense, what we're trying to do here is reflect the that where our potential, uh, where our members are at. And I think, uh, clearly like Anthony is in that 38% of folks who are very, uh, opposed to, um, uh, to, uh, seeing this move forward in any capacity. Um, so, um, that being said, um, you know, uh, we're, uh, You know, I do appreciate, as Hannah indicated, the relationship that we have with Director Bixler and his team. You know, we are always able to essentially talk through these sorts of issues and, you try to find a balancing point on how to move forward on these really complex and complicated subject matters. So, you know, I think, well, I believe, and I mentioned this at PNF the other week, there was a great story about Reveal Nationwide or NPR podcast that was syndicated across NPR featured Dane County Communication Center featured Deputy Director Leonard, as well as Hannah, who you just heard from. And they really highlighted how our answer times are off the charts compared to other places across the county. So I think what we're trying to do here is make sure that this tool, if we do move forward with it, there is significant employee engagement. engagement buy-in, uh, that employees feel like they have, uh, a choice, uh, as far as, or, you know, that they're somewhat at the driving wheel too, when it comes to these decisions and how they're being made. Um, so, um, you, uh, we did, uh, uh, forward some, uh, language that we could potentially add to the resolution, which, uh, addresses those three points that, uh, Hannah had, had alluded to, um, and then would potentially, um, you know, require some some oversight, some reporting to the committee on a quarterly basis. I know We haven't had a chance to talk with all of you yet, so I apologize for that. You know, again, with the contract being released on Friday, we really wanted to figure out where our members were first and, you know, try and find a place of consensus where we could try and move forward with something that is reflective of where our membership is as a whole. So, yeah, with that, I'm probably pretty close to five minutes, so I will wrap it up and answer any questions that you have.

Thank you, Derek. Any questions for Derek? Supervisor Larson, go ahead.

Hi, Derek. It's good to see you again. And I heard that same NPR story. Congratulations to the Dane County team that made that all happen. It sounded like you were rated really highly and you're performing really well under an intense amount of pressure. I did have a couple, well, one question, basically. After reading this earlier today, I understood through conversation that this particular program has been under testing and review and at least somewhat implemented within the center. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct. I think directors are probably be able to speak to that a little bit further. But yes, that is my understanding that it's been turned on occasionally to be tested.

Okay, I'll with all the questions for Director Bixler then. Thank you.

Supervisor Larson, is there any other questions? Thank you, Derek. I just wanted to make sure we have an Allie Bates that's registered for public comment. I believe it's probably on the discussion item, but it does use a number that does not exist on our agenda. So I just wanted to make sure Allie didn't have any comments on this particular item. Stephanie, could you promote Allie for one moment, please?

I do not see her on the attendees list. Okay.

Thank you. Okay. So I'd like to invite up Director Bixler to talk about this item and possibly address any of this questions or concerns that have come up and answer questions from the committee. So, Director Bixler. Thank you, Chair Furman.

So I may just, speaking about Aurelian, so Supervisor Larson, for your question, so in... Last year, approximately March, we started investigating some AI call solutions. Really, as our IVR, which is Interactive Voice Response Unit, a phone tree, ours had gotten end of life. So a lot of the equipment we had was end of life. And so we started researching what can we do to do better? Because right now the IVR we have is... basically what's called a dumb IVR. So you call and you have to press this for that, press this for that. So anybody that calls non-emergency automatically has to go into that phone tree. First question it'll ask is if the incident's occurring now or if it's something that's not occurring now. Not quite as clear as it could be, but that's where it should designate if someone needs a 911 type response. And then if they hit occurring now, it puts it into the 911 queue. Now, for example, a lot of the people that are calling 911 are calling for referrals, things like I want to call the Monono Fire Department for a festival or something like that. Right now in our IVR, they'd have to sit through seven prompts. which is incredibly frustrating. I'd get you the exact number, but we can't get that off of our IVR. We can't get any data off of our non-emergency line right now because we don't log non-emergency calls unless there's a dispatch that happens. So that really came into a detriment when we were looking at implementing our behavioral call diversion. And we wanted to find out how many people were calling with mental health emergencies or mental health situations that we were referring off to. 988 or something along those lines. We weren't able to get that data. So we lost a great deal of that. The reason we don't have that is because if we expected our communicators to log an additional 54% of the calls they get, they wouldn't have time to take 911 calls. This county does not have a 3-1-1 system. We've attempted to do that throughout the last 15, 20 years, and it's been cost prohibitive. We just can't do it. Most communities have a 3-1-1 system to prevent exactly that. the same communicators that are answering 911 call lines to actually spend the majority of their time answering non-emergency lines. Now, Tony's absolutely right. There are times where we get emergency calls on our non-emergency line. And Once it's established, they get a dispatch and they get treated like 911 calls. This Aurelian system, when we were looking for a system, we were looking specifically for a system that would be able to identify that. And how would it be able to identify it? We'd feed the system approximately 10,000 of our non-emergency calls. And then the system itself with the programmers would determine, okay, of these 10,000 calls, What's the percentage that went to 911 that was occurring now? What were the keywords that were used in there to determine it? And that's what's built in to have as a fail-safe in case the system says, okay, this person has this kind of incident and they're going to call. And what about the person that was calling for the Monona Fire Department that had to sit with our current system through seven prompts They probably didn't sit through all seven prompts. They probably got through three of them, and they yelled some kind of expletive into the phone and hit the button for a communicator. Well, with Aurelion, all they have to do is call. And if we want, it doesn't have to be called Aurelion. The AI call taker is called Ava. whatever we want to call it, whether it's Aurelian or Ava, will then ask the caller what they're looking for. They say, I'm looking for the phone number for Monona Fire. It'll give them the phone number, and it'll say, if you're calling from a mobile phone, I can text it to you. So that not only does it divert that call, but then it's able to give the caller a reference point so in the future they don't have to call non-emergency again with that. Last week or week before last, when I gave the overview on the department, one of the things I talked about was when we moved from our current old wireline system to ESINET or next generation 911, was that we eliminated those phone trunks. Phone trunks are what limited the 911 calls to eight calls. On the ninth call, you got a busy signal if you were the ninth caller. So now when we eliminated that, What we got is unlimited calls to 911. So when there is an accident on the Beltline, when there is a fight at East High, we get 30, 40 calls. Everyone that has a cell phone is calling in on it. So we went from limiting that to eight, where we could also manage the non-emergency calls that were coming in at once, because staff are trained. If they're on a non-emergency call and 911 is beeping, they're to place that non-emergency call on hold so that they can get the 911 call. becomes super complicated because at that point you have two active calls going on it's it's it's a little it's a little much so if what we what we figured with aurelian and a really good ivr system which is what ava is is to be able to free up that time that they would be spent on that non-emergency call to be ready for those 20 or 30 calls that came in and then be able to utilize some of the tools we have to say okay as a supervisor i want you to direct that communicator to take that outlying call in the county as opposed to all these other ones that we know is a beltline accident because this call is going to be different and it's going to take longer to get a response out there so we wouldn't be able to do that if they're taking if communicators are taking non-emergency calls or the amount of non-emergency calls they're taking now now With the IVR, when we put that in place in 2000, I believe 2007, 2008, that diverted 12% of non-E call volume. So didn't eliminate it. And AVA's not going to eliminate non-emergency call volume now either. What we're looking at is approximately 40% to 60% of that being eliminated or diverted. There's still going to be the human interaction part with it. And more importantly, most not more importantly, but just as importantly, there's going to be data collected with all those calls that are either being diverted or being put into non-emergency for dispatch so that we can continue to monitor that, continue to see how the system is growing and continue to make sure it is being right. Report that back to, and there is plans to report that back to the communicators because we want to be transparent with that community. We didn't do mandatory training on Ava yet. We did a voluntary training because we haven't signed a contract yet. We're not going to do mandatory training because that incurs a cost as part of that contract. We have a $25,000 contract that we set up with Aurelian for a web chat version, which is going to be placed in with the voice platform. And that allowed the limited training that we got for the exposure that was the voluntary training. If the contract gets signed, then mandatory training will be going because it is going to be something that all staff need to know. With that mandatory training and with the training that everyone went through, there are people that chose to go through it a month ago, there's also a mechanism in there so that staff can ask questions directly to the Aurelian developers. And we've been checking. There's not a lot of questions being put into it yet. But the questions that are being put in are getting responses pretty quickly back from the developers. So they're very responsive in being able to keep that up. We also made sure that when we looked at the different platforms out there for this type of system, that what we were seeing was You want to be an early adopter, but you don't want to be the first adopter with stuff like this. And we weren't. So we were able to look at places like Waukesha, places like La Crosse that have implemented these systems and have seen these concerns are across the board, no matter what. And they had those concerns. And so far, they have not seen any negative outcomes from that. The liability aspect. is with Aurelian and the PSC. It does not change the liability of the communicator. The definition of negligence doesn't change for the communicator. The contract itself stipulates what the liability dollar amount is for the company Aurelian and the county carries insurance for the other half. This does not impact communicator. If it's used by the way it's trained, if it's used properly, if it's used the way it's developed, there's no liability aspect for the individual level. You know, I definitely want to thank Hannah and Derek. Our relationships are super positive, and we can agree and disagree on things and still have it be productive and collaborative. One of the things I want to make sure that's understood is this isn't the majority of staff. This is the majority of 53%. We're talking 16, 17 people out of 77. And I don't believe... Kudos to the EGR for trying to get as much input as possible in a very short time. So I'm definitely not... not blearing that but i also want to make sure that we all understand that is not the majority of staff when ridland farms took off and we had two to three thousand calls that were coming in every two days and we were able to enact the system to divert those calls so that we could continue our operations to take 911 and legitimate non-emergency calls staff were very appreciative and supportive of this um I don't fault staff either. It's scary to have something like AI potentially coming in. I also want to make sure that this equipment, this resolution doesn't do anything to eliminate any ordinances. It doesn't change ordinances. I can't eliminate positions within PSC. I'm not able to do that. I can't. hold positions, if I hold a position vacant for more than six months, I have to answer to that on why I held it. And if my answer is going to be I held it because this AI was doing the job for people, that's not going to be met well with this committee, with PNF, or with the community, and definitely not with staff. We've worked incredibly hard in the last three years to make sure that we're filling our vacancies at a consistent rate. We have some of the best staffing numbers in the country, and that's nothing that we're going to let go by the wayside for this service. Because what we're going to be able to do with AVA is we're gonna be able to utilize that availability to actually conduct on-duty training. to treat our staff like actual first responders and be able to do that consistent training while they're on duty as opposed to saying, hey, come in on your day off and we're going to take up a lot of your day off for this mandatory training that's important. There's a lot to catch up on and this availability is going to help us get there. It's going to help us get additional law dispatchers. It's going to help us get additional In addition to the training of the law dispatchers, it's going to help us implement, hopefully, if it does what we think it can do, implement better schedules for staff, schedules that they've sought, higher time off quotas. The benefit, if it works correctly and we manage it correctly, is really infinite, and it's really exciting, and I understand why staff are afraid, and I don't fault them, but This is something that we are going to use responsibly, and it's a subscription service as well. So if it doesn't give us the impact that we want, it doesn't meet our needs, it's not going to be kept in service.

Thank you, Director. Are there questions for the Director?

Yeah, I've got a few to start. So when we talked about the AI platform last time, we discussed briefly, and I apologize, my fellow supervisors, I'm not familiar with the ordinance on AI implementation and AI tools. You discussed that it was reviewed by a member of staff who said that it wasn't definitively AI. What's the difference here? What have they said? Is there an exemption around that? Because it seems a lot more AI than previously.

This one is because it was actually introduced in 2025. through the um through the bid waiver so when sam dcim when sam reviewed it um the other one the other the the ref cord was exempt because it wasn't ai and this was exempt because it wasn't within that time frame so essentially it got around the time frame with that okay it did gotcha um

Okay, great. You mentioned a few municipalities. I'm sorry I didn't get you this question ahead of time. Do you know... Which other, if there are other large municipalities, I know you mentioned Waukesha, which is a bit bigger, but are there any little large municipalities that have implemented similar systems?

Nationwide, there's Kalamazoo, who's probably been the closest to our size, as well as, and I forget, I'll have to double check, we actually hosted a symposium with Aurelian that brought some of those users as well as some nationwide users to us. But I can definitely get you the names of some of the larger municipalities.

Yeah, no sweat. I know Kalamazoo is pretty big. I don't imagine we'd be the largest. No. I just wanted to ask, given the size of the municipalities you did mention. Yeah, you did also mention that you'd be feeding it 10,000 training calls in order to kind of get it started. I guess familiarize might be a word with how those calls tend to proceed. How would you do that if there aren't logs of current calls?

Sure. So that was actually already done. That was done to build out the web portion as well, as well as to see if this was a viable solution for us. So the call recordings exist. The call logs for the CAD do not. So we don't get data off of the call logs because then we'd have to listen to those 10,000 calls or whatnot. We get it straight off of our data off of CAD.

So I guess to say you have straight audio, but you don't have it processed. Correct. We talked a little bit about liability. I know staff, and it makes total sense why staff is concerned about personal liability. I have a lot more concerns regarding county liability, regarding situations where emergency calls are put on the non-emergency line, or at least very sensitive calls could go to non-emergency line for various different reasons. This feels like a system that if it misses once, could pose a significant liability, whether that's held by Aurelian or the county. Do you know if that's spoken to in the contract, whether that would be the... Yeah, and I want to say, Carlos, do you want to jump in here?

Yeah. So there is an indemnification to hold harmless clause that essentially Aurelian has to indemnify the county for basically everything except for those issues that the county itself has caused through its own gross negligence. Gross negligence.

Is that defined to mean specifically the product here, or would the county need to prove that the product was trained improperly or some other way?

It's going to be really fact intensive, but typically, yeah, it would be one of those situations where we'll have to, we'll probably claim it's not gross negligence. They will claim it is. It's very standard in terms of our contracts.

Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. I guess in that case, have you been in talks with Aurelian about those kinds of situations? I imagine since the contract's going to speak to it, maybe not. But have you maybe asked them if there have been settled legal issues with other municipalities regarding just instances where, I guess, could you speak to the safeguards that might be in place for this? Sure.

The safeguards are really built in as far as with the, this isn't, this system this platform isn't unobserved by a human so basically one of the duties that's going to be is one of our communicators is as the call is going there's a written transcription that's going on so we're not going to be having we would dedicate a person to look at that because essentially then at that point you're instead of having three or four people doing non-emergency you're having one person monitor the computer that's doing, or the program that's doing three or four of those. Now to answer the question as far as how do we limit the amount of, or how do we mitigate some of that risk? It's done through public education in the very beginning. One of the things that we saw is for Waukesha in particular, when they rolled it out, they didn't do, they could have done a better job. There's more opportunity of advising the public what was going on. of letting them know what the system does and what the expectation of the user is. At that point, that is really where we need to make sure we do a better job as a 911 center and as a county to tell people, if you're not sure whether you should call 911 or non-emergency, you need to call 911, without doubt. Now, if you still call non-emergency and you get this system, It should send you to a communicator right away. But at some point, and this is fact, is people have to be liable for their own actions. And if we do our best to educate the public to it, And to mitigate any potential opportunity, then the rest of it is, this is the unfortunate fact of the 911 industry. There are going to be negative outcomes. And no matter what you do to put there, sometimes negative outcomes are just there. What matters is what we do to mitigate those negative outcomes.

I guess kind of speaking more to that point, is there any potentiality or maybe even plans to, say, find really specific cases where, say, somebody was diverted to information regarding where to seek? One situation that's come to my mind as a survivor myself is if I were to try to figure out where should I go if I wanted to meet with a forensic nurse after a sexual assault, I personally know that that is...

I'm blanking on the name right now.

Meritor downtown is the only ER with an OB-GYN in-house, but is there any way to go through and pull all the calls that have been done where that kind of diversion has been done and say feed that directly into it so it can recognize those kinds of, that kind of language? Is there any kind of proactive approach to training to be done?

Absolutely. So that's actually part of the contract and the program as well, is that it's continued to be monitored by Aurelian and by their developers and their staff to look at what's being diverted away and what could have not been. So like during Aurelian, one of the things that we found is that if there's excessive background noise, The system doesn't do a good job of diverting the call of determining what's going on. It just it can't pick up what specific sounds are made. So we're able to set the cautions to it to where if there's a lot of background noise, it's automatically going to go to a communicator. Doesn't matter what what the individual is saying. Because we'd rather, obviously we have the staff, and we'd rather go on that end than say, oh, it might be that, but it might not. So let's just have Ava look at it. So that's part of the fail-safes with it and part of what's going to be occurring as a QA for the system itself.

Gotcha. And you did talk about a little regarding communicators reviewing the calls. Would that be happening live or is that all retroactive? That's all live. It's live.

Okay.

So you'd be able to see the actual text flow of the conversation. Would a communicator be able to intervene, like pick up a call immediately just from the text being put before them?

They would. As well as if a call is going in for dispatch, but that communicator knows, okay, this is a unique situation that may need some specific additional info that wasn't built into the system because it's never going to be 100%, then that's actually going to be part of their responsibility to contact that individual for dispatch. Okay. I think those are all the questions that I have at this time.

Hey, Supervisor, are there other questions? Supervisor Larson, in the future, Supervisor Larson, just as an FYI, and anybody else on Zoom, just type into chat that you want to ask a question or discuss in case I don't see you waving your hand. But go ahead, Supervisor Larson.

Thank you so much. Director Vixler, it's good to see you again. I just was hoping that you had any thoughts you could share in response to Mr. Olson's comments regarding staff wellness. I take the word that when the operators are receiving calls, both of the 911 actual variety And then the non-emergent calls, it serves as sort of a wellness, you know, a bit of a break just because it's, you know, handling information or helping the public and can serve to, you know, eliminate some cortisol or stress throughout the day. Are you able to comment on how that would change the use of this device or system?

Absolutely, and that's a great question and great point from Tony. So right now, what we strive for is we strive for 70% occupancy. So 70% of the time, the communicators' workday, they're actually physically speaking on the phone. We've come closer to achieving that at an 80% level. There's 911 calls that aren't emergencies. There's non-e-calls that are emergencies. The greatest reduction that we see and that the industry is seeing in reducing stress for communicators is by reducing that occupancy time. So actually by reducing the amount of non-emergency calls they're processing and giving more time between calls, in conjunction with our peer support and with our mental health check-ins and everything else, that's how we address that situation as well as continuing to invest in a trauma-informed environment for the center.

Thank you, Supervisor. Thank you. Supervisor Belger, go ahead.

Thank you. So I just want to make sure I have this straight in my head. This only picks up people who actually dial, call the non-emergency number. Correct. So it's not like it's, you're getting, if you call 911, you're getting a person anyway. Absolutely. And that's my experience a few times I've used it. I mean, I know this other system was in place, so I don't know. And the concern maybe from the call center operators, I'm sorry, is that it could... potentially get an emergency call that it doesn't identify quicker than a person.

And that could be a potential, but right now there's automatically a built-in delay on all the non-emergency calls because the person has to exactly pick the prompt. So this actually doesn't do much more of a delay as opposed to that.

Right. And the caller on the line, I guess Tony, said something about the settings. Can you work with that in Aurelian and when you're training on it?

Correct. And that's the purpose. And that's the purpose with the consistent QA is to make sure that we are adjusting it to what – to meet the needs of the data that we're getting in. So it's definitely, I don't want anyone to think, especially staff, to think that this is going to be one of those contracts that we just, we get, we put in, and we forget about it, that this cannot be that type of system. And the vendor doesn't market it as that type of system. It's a very, it's a smaller company that they're actually, their owner is very engaged with us and wanting to develop it better.

Just on that point. Oh, this is only a one-year contract. Is that what I'm saying here?

It's an annual subscription. The MSA is up to three years.

So in a sense, if there is really big issues, we can get out of this pretty quick.

30 days for the contract. So we can, if that's...

This TikTok influencer with more than five... Barrett, you got unmuted. If you can mute yourself, that'd be great. Thank you. Thank you, supervisor. Other questions? Yes.

So going back to the settings, and it was mentioned that it could push back on someone wanting to speak to a person. So I guess what does it have like? A natural human-sounding voice?

It does.

It does? It sounds like a person.

It sounds like a person, not like a robot. But if an individual says they want to speak to a person, they're getting a person.

Okay. Okay, that was my question.

Thank you. Does it indicate that it's not a person, though? So even though it sounds like a person, does it say I'm an assistant that's helping? I will have to follow up on that. That's a good question. Okay. Because pretending to be a human being and not being a human being is not ideal.

I'm embarrassed I didn't think of that. Any other questions for the director? I have a few more follow-up from the other supervisors, too. Is it correct that this is per the payment, I guess? Is it lump sum, like no matter how many callers come in, or is it like an estimated per call? It's estimated per call. Does retraining the tool or feeding more training data into it, or say if it's determined that there's like a better – Say we get a whole bunch of calls in through it and you kind of want to retrain on the data that's already been pushed through with successful calls. Is there any cost associated with retraining the tool? No, that's part of the equipment itself. Okay, awesome. Are there... I guess, are there any plans for large data set, like aggregated analysis? Like what kind of rubric like metrics are you going to look for with success? Like what does success look like for this tool?

Sure. So a couple of things on that. I smile because one of the recent interactions we had in the symposium was um someone asked okay is this like a large data center stuff and how much energy and water is it using everything else it uses less energy than one computer and it uses one cup of water a day so for the equipment so it doesn't have the impact that a large data center would have um and i'm sorry what was the other part kind of just the the like larger like if you were to step back say we get to a year from now how would you determine whether

Yep.

this had better or on par or worse outcomes compared to live operators?

Sure. I think the first and foremost thing we're looking at, we're going to look at is the diverted call volume, right? And then from that diverted call volume, we then dissect it into, okay, what type of calls are being transferred and how many of those callers came back to us. So we want a one and done solution because if the system is referring callers somewhere else, but that's not what they wanted, then we're actually artificially increasing more calls to non-emergency. The other aspect that we need to see is how many, and this is even more higher prioritization, is how many of those calls within the same day phone numbers called and called directly into 911. so that we can investigate why weren't those calls initially put into 911? What prompted them to do them? It may be something that was just naturally occurring, but it may be something that the system itself had wanted to do. And the nice thing with this system is it's got a very robust dashboard, and unlike a lot of other vendors, we don't have to build out that dashboard. We can tell the vendor what we want on that, and we can continue to evolve it.

Okay, so there's an opportunity for feedback on the micro, like the user level. Correct. As far as plans for implementation regarding staff, staff feedback and communication, what are your current plans if you have any? Say if this were to pass or to go through in our next board meeting, we vote for it and it gets implemented. How would you approach implementation with staff? I know you kind of spoke to mandatory training. If I... Not to opine in depth, but I would be of the mind personally that if this is going to be something that takes the lead over a call tree, you know it's going to be asked what the person's been prompted through. This is very much not the case. And I can kind of, again, go through this because I do have it, luckily, in notes. Education for the operators on how the tool works, but also...

feedback from them maybe on how education could be done for the community.

I figure the people who talk with the community might be best suited to educate the community on what this is.

Absolutely. So there's two levels with that community outreach part. There is the communicator part of it, and there's also Aurelian has a specific person that will help roll out the information to the public that they've encountered. So we combine kind of both of them to get that part out there because it's not just stuff. We don't want to just do the outreach for Aurelian. We want to do it as part of how to properly use 911. There's a lot more to it as opposed to just that, because there's going to be some fear and skepticism from the public. And if we don't do that effectively and don't do public outreach effectively, then what we saw with a lot of people in Waukesha, they came out as inadvertently thinking that this was a 911 solution, that 911 was actually going to be AI. And that's not what we're going for, and that's seriously fearful for a lot of people, and that's justifiably so.

Gotcha. And I guess kind of combining what you'd said earlier about how, you know, the bare majority of people were able to respond on an extreme short notice for feedback on something like this. What is, do you plan on interacting with every single communicator regarding this tool, whether that's via direct training or some other kind of mandatory disclosure of information request for feedback in whatever way?

So a couple of different levels on that. Every communicator should be having monthly coaching sessions with their supervisor. We would add this on as an additional discussion point during those monthly one-on-ones. A lot of times what we've seen is when we ask for... for discussion or when we ask for feedback, we don't tend to get a lot of it or what we get is solely, solely negative. People tend to say to be really quick for negative, but not what's going on with positive. If we can do it, narrow it down to one on one level between the individual and their supervisor, then we probably get more More candid feedback and more accurate feedback. And then we meet with the EGR every six weeks. Kind of fell off for a little bit there, but every six weeks, that would also be a standing item within that labor management meeting to discuss. Gotcha.

And I guess... So I'd be harder for the second. So it's so my thinking is that might slow down feedback from staff. Is there any intent on maybe speaking with leadership within the communications team to talk about how to potentially feed valuable training data in ahead of time before this were to get implemented? Not sure I understand. Kind of like how I talked about earlier, there's a specific kind of diversion where it's really sensitive. The kind of thing where if it gets diverted in a particular way to a particular place, that's very sensitive and should be preemptively trained in so the tool can recognize that nature of call. Because if, I don't know, if I were to call a system and try to speak with a person to ask a really sensitive question about something horrible going on in my life, I might choose to not follow through at all. It might be the difference between giving a victim a choice between having evidence to choose whether to prosecute or not versus otherwise. So I guess... You and I couldn't sit down and talk about all the different kinds of tools to kind of look at communicators would be the only ones who could identify the diversion. Essentially, you're to backtrace a diversion to this facility or with this information would be that highly sensitive. Would you meet with communicators on stuff like that? Those cases are the ones that I'm personally really concerned of.

We could, we absolutely could. There was no plans to it, but also the training, the actual training that is conducted by Aurelian, their trainers are the actual developers of it. So that's where a lot of the opportunity comes in to say, okay, especially for communicators and getting that mind where they do have a, what would happen if X happens? Then the developer can specifically lay out that situation or say, you know what, that's not in there. We can develop that and we can build it in there before it goes wrong. before we had the finished product rolled out to the public. The system itself will also always have that ability to give real-time feedback to the developers, which then also comes back and is monitored by management as well.

Okay, so you would be able to receive that directly and be responsive to it? Absolutely. Okay, great. You mentioned, kind of stepping aside, you mentioned potential changes to scheduling or maybe more flexibility, I think is the word that you might have used. Can you speak a little bit more to that as far as what that would mean? I know it sounds like a lot of people on your teams, the communication teams, are working a lot of overtime, maybe in particular seasons. Not so much anymore. Yeah, if somebody, say, needs that over time, if they, say, have a single-income household and need the overtime, would that still be available to do on it?

Absolutely.

So when we determine our staffing, it's based off of... Yeah, I'm not sure if that's directly related to this. Okay. The discussion is getting long, so...

Okay.

Are there other questions that you have?

No, this is the last.

Okay. Okay. If you could answer that quickly, go ahead.

Sure. Basically, all we're doing is reducing the amount of non-emergency call volume. So what we're able to do then is utilize that to reduce the total number of mandatory staff within our current shift schedule so we can offer more time off quotas. If it goes as expected and gives us the 40% to 60%, we're not committing to anything yet because we don't know what the actual outcome will be.

Okay, thank you. So at this point, if there are no other questions for the door...

I'm sorry, I'll be really fast.

It's really easy.

So what happens when someone calls the non-emergency line and they decide to just hang up? What would AVA or the AI system do? How does that get handled?

So it would be able to determine what was leading up to that. And if it did hear... you know, something that gave a concern, it would get like a 911 disconnect, essentially. So if they heard someone, for example, say kill or something like that, and even though that individual hung up, it would forward that to a 911 communicator.

So it would have to hear certain words. It would have to hear certain words. In order, and if it didn't, you know, like sometimes children call or someone, you know. Exactly. And they hang up, so.

And that's no different than today with the phone tree.

Okay.

But that number is a complicated number to call. It's not 911. It's 255-2345. Okay. Unfortunately, I know it really well. All right. So if there are no other questions, I'd like to take a motion. Does anybody have a motion? I'll move it. Okay. Discussion? Discussion on this item?

Just briefly. obviously we need to upgrade the system um i think there are some real concerns and i think i like the length of the contract um and 30 days if it's really if every i think it would be if everyone was in agreement that this thing is just blown up and it's not serving the public and that's really the most important part anyway um i think that it gives us an out um I just think it's kind of ironic. Here we are passing something with AI. But, you know, as Director Bickler just said, it doesn't use a lot of energy after we just put a moratorium on fields. And we always have these debates in my house. Like, oh, yeah, use that. And then you suck an energy up somewhere. So anyway, I mean, I like the idea that. folks, and I don't want to get in anybody's time, call centers' heads or shoes. Just having a break seems to me a mental break, but I understand the point of earlier having some lighter calls and easier and still being working, but I see just that spreading out, just time when folks are on the phone. Thank you, Supervisor.

Supervisor Lewis? No. Just, I guess, so I obviously have quite a few concerns and apprehensions regarding this tool. Obviously, like Supervisor Veldren said, we do need some kind of process to exist versus the outdated system that we currently have. In effect, I... I share a lot of concerns with staff. I do feel like the short term of the contract and the fact that we can cease it is more hopeful. Yeah, I just hope that staff is more fully integrated with both the preparation for implementation with this tool and get your response to it. It sounds like you're willing to do so, and I'm grateful for that. But, yeah, I am reluctantly in favor of this.

Supervisor, any other discussion? Not seeing any. Unless I hear otherwise, I will assume unanimous consent. And we'll move on to our next item. Thank you, Director. Thank you all. The next item on our agenda is 2026 Resolution 041, establishing a petty cash checking account for the Dane County Office of Justice Reform. We don't have anybody signed up to speak, so I'm going to take a motion. If somebody wants to give me a motion for this item. So moved. Thank you. And I know Colleen is here, the director of the department, to answer questions. I don't know if anybody has any questions about this item or any discussion. She could just go over. I mean, it's petty cash, but... Hi, we see you. Thank you for joining us this evening. If you wanted to give a brief overview, that'd be great.

Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Chair and PPNJ members. The resolution you see before you today is largely an accounting operations resolution. So the Office of Justice Reform is where I sit. And we are coordinating the Dane County Community Court. The community court is starting and we would like a way to use existing funds in my outreach line. So OJR has a very small outreach line annually of $5,000. I'd like to use $2,000 of that. to form part of our incentives. So the community court judge and coordinator upon seeing participants that are in the community court doing what they have agreed to and really moving forward for better health outcomes for themselves and less victimization for others, then would be able to draw a very small incentive. Judge Trammell is our community court judge. She has created an incentive box. Sometimes it could be, you know, an incentive on a starboard or an inspirational message or congratulations from the entire community court team. And other times maybe it's a $10 gift card for gas. So this is really just an accounting measure. When the department was created, Other departments have these lines that give us an opportunity to get gift cards. The Office of Justice Reform did not have that line. So if this resolution is ultimately passed, then I would be able to work with the Comptroller's Office going through all the appropriate measures for the county for buying those and the tracking of those for our participants and add that into our community court case management system. But as it stands, I have no way to buy those incentives, those gift cards.

Thank you, Director. Are there questions? Not seeing any. Thank you again, Director. Is there discussions? Not seeing any, and unless I hear otherwise, I will assume unanimous consent and we'll move on to our next item. Our next item on the agenda is 2026 Resolution 49, extending an inter-agency agreement between the Dane County District Attorney's Office and COTG 2021 for continued comprehensive drug testing for the Deferred Prosecution Program. There's nobody signed up to speak for this, and so I would entertain a motion. I move approval. Thank you. I see the director of the program here, Melvin, is here. If anybody has questions on this item, I know he'd be happy to answer it. Are there any questions on this item?

Is this just an increase? You might as well come up. Is this just an increase then? It's not existing? It's not an increase?

An increase in the contract. We have $40,000 in our budget specifically for drug testing. However, each time when you have a contract, if the contract is over $100,000 and it's concurrent, then we have the best solution to pass it. Right. No, I understand.

Thank you. No, I just saw the increase in the contract, the current amounts. Yeah. But it's just putting it together. Is that what you're saying? Correct.

Any other questions for the director?

No.

Thank you. Discussion? Discussion. Not seeing any, unless I hear otherwise, I'll assume approval by unanimous consent and move on to our next item. And our next item is also with the director, and it's 2026, Resolution 050, and it's extending an interagency agreement between the District Attorney's Office and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute for continued program evaluation of the Deferred Prosecution Opiate Diversion Program. I will entertain a motion. move approval thank you are there questions for the director not seeing any um is there any discussion not seeing any unless i hear otherwise i will assume approval by unanimous consent thank you so much for being here this evening thank you and now we'll move on to our discussion items uh portion of the meeting uh followed by presentations um in front of us this evening um is uh uh just an item for discussion we're not taking any vote um But it's based on the resolution that we passed at our last PPNJ and passed in front of the board, which is trying to help provide guidance for the request for proposal for jail resident communication services. I am very appreciative that the sheriff's office has done this. done a ton of outreach with me to try to better understand the community feedback as well as board feedback on how to put out an RFP that reflects our values. And so I do want to start by saying thank you very, very much. The work is reflected in this attachment to this item that talks about what changes would be reflected in the RFP compared to the 2025 RFP, noting that there's a lot of very technical details involved. in the 2025 RFP specific to the jail that is not changing, but we're looking to do some sort of subsidy option as well as adjust the privacy. So Stephanie, would you mind pulling up the 2026 discussion document?

Sure, just give me a second.

Yep, and so as Stephanie does that, I'd like to just, I guess, open the floor for, well, I mean, I'm happy to just kind of briefly touch on the points in there. Did you create this?

I'm sorry? Did you create this?

I did not create this. Purchasing created this, working with the Sheriff's Department and getting some feedback and input from me, but this was not written by me. This is a long work product, very appreciated by Purchasing and the Sheriff's Department. So it focuses on ownership of data, acknowledging our ordinance change, as well as that they can't be profiting from our data. It talks about data protection requirements, And the biggest... And most important change for us is talking about cost proposal. So the way this is likely intended to go out is to ask vendors to provide a resident rate as well as a Danton County rate for voice messages and video calls. And it's encouraging vendors to be creative when it comes to The Dane county rates, but, you know, to let us know if we were to buy to give us a better idea if we were to buy minutes, whether that's video or voice or by messages, what would that cost for us? And so there's a nice chart on the page five that does. I believe that's five or maybe it's four. Yeah, page four, sorry. That does a good job of showing the proposed attachment that the RFP recipients would fill out. And again, it's focused on resident rate and then Dane County rate and gives them the ability to provide that information as part of their response.

Okay. What's the difference in the Dane County rate and the resident rate?

Yeah, so thank you. I'm assuming people understand what's going on in my head, so I appreciate that question. The resident rate is how the current contract is structured, which means it's the rate that a friend or family member would pay to communicate with a jail resident. And so that's the resident rate. The Dane County rate is if we were to buy bulk minutes to subsidize this, So, what would be our rate? And some companies may come back and say your rate is the same as the residents, and others might go, oh, that's one transaction to do 20% of the minutes, we're willing to give it to you for this, or 50% of the minutes or 100% of the minutes, we're willing to give it to you for that. But, you know, we definitely want to see if there's an option for there to be a better price if we're subsidizing it. And then based on that, the goal would be for us as a board to be able to go, okay, now that we know what the cost is, here's what we were able to find in the budget. Here's what we can agree upon. We'd like to subsidize 20% of this or 50% of this, or obviously I'd love to subsidize 100% of it, but we're not going to know that without getting that data and that information and at least trying to get that better rate. Are there other questions? Yeah.

Kind of just the same question. Obviously, this is all presuming that the message volume or the call volume would be the same as present. Is that the case?

So that's where it gets complicated and difficult. If it's 100% subsidized, the research that the Sheriff's Department has not surprisingly found is that people end up using it more. And so, you know, the rate, I think, will give us a better idea. And so, you know, we may say, okay, our 100% subsidy is capped at what our current usage is because that's all we can predict and that's all we can budget. But it's very much, you know, we're going to have to see that based on the rates. But our current usage for minutes, for example, I think my understanding is it was 7.5 million minutes in 2025. And so the idea is we may just be able to do 10% subsidies. So then we would look at what does 750,000 minutes do for us? And that's where we're looking for the vendors to make a proposal. So for example, it was my understanding like Viapath said, when they were providing in their last contract that we rejected, they said, you know, we can't give five minutes a day and make it multiple calls, whether it's one-minute call, a two-minute call. It has to be one call up to five minutes, and then we have to move on to the pay thing. So we're going to have to figure out, you know, how we use a bucket like that based on what we can afford and, you know, you know, what the vendor provides. So it might be, you know, we're buying two 10-minute calls or we're buying, you know, five, you know, and five messages. And so it's very, it's going to be very dependent on what the numbers come back and what we can afford. And so this is, and major thanks to the Sharers Department and purchasing, this is unlike anything they've done and probably unlike anything they'll ever do again because of where the budget is and because of the relationship of charging residents, the community, and these microtransactions is what I've been calling them, and then having that bulk ability to hopefully give us a much better rate if we're buying things up front. Awesome. Thank you. The next one.

Do you want the RFP up?

Yeah, I'm Stephanie. So this is the RFP. I'm not sure the other document, the 2026 document. I think the so there's a 2025 document. There's a 2026 document. 2026 page four, I think, is just the best visual to have up on the screen. I see a bunch of supervisors next to me. I've also pulled that out. Any other questions or thoughts? We have the Sheriff's Department here that would be happy to, I'm sure, answer any questions or help clarify anything in this that I may not have said. But again, I mean, they have put in, along with purchasing, a ton of effort to really try to navigate a very unique situation, and I very much appreciate that.

I just wanted to ask the Sheriff. Sheriff... So it was dangerous when you start going down these paths. Is there any concern that it shouldn't be because if we're telling vendors that we're going to pay part of it, that they'll easily put in a bid? Do you think that is a concern or is there anything here that the other thing I'm worried about is some kind of like chilling effect where no one wants to bid?

Yeah, there's always that concern that no one will put in for the bid. Again, it's a very complicated system that we have or complicated with the three buildings that we will have. There's a lot that goes into it. We can only go off of the past in regards to who's put in in the past, which has been two companies that were not approved or the contracts weren't approved. So it's very unknown what this would look like or what or or the success of this i do know this if no one puts in that will put us back way behind the eight ball uh so it is just something that we have to consider moving forward as mentioned earlier this has never been done before and uh there's a there's a lot at stake here uh chris you want to add anything chris chris is on uh no we uh

It's certainly a different RFP than we issued before, so it's hard to know what will interest the vendors out there. If it will bring the same people or bring new people or bring more, we don't know. But that's the same for all RFPs. We just don't know what we're going to get.

And I do want to apologize. We did have two speakers. One is not here, but AJ, I want to take a pause for a moment and see if AJ is with us and it can promote AJ and give AJ five minutes. You have the benefit of our discussion as you make your public comments. And hopefully that helps give you some guidance on what this is set up.

But yeah, promoting AJ now.

Thank you so much. AJ, I got you can go ahead and unmute yourself and my apologies for not calling on you sooner, but hopefully you get the benefit of some of our conversation.

Oh, no worries. Thanks for hearing me out. Um, so yeah, I guess first off, I definitely want to say, um, I'm liking a lot of things in this, uh, RFP, uh, like proposal. Um, yeah, absolutely love the, uh, improvements to data privacy and ownership. Um, specifically love the strong language around, uh, tablets, tablet usage fees. Um, like where it says like prohibition on tablet usage fees, elimination of per minute rates fees for basic tablet functions. Yeah, I really like that part. It's strong language. No notes. Things that I think could still be improved. I'm a little concerned with how, like it says in Section 9, it only encourages vendors to provide additional services offered at no cost. I'm worried this will get us in the same situation where a company just says like, hey, here's your one free phone call and that would satisfy this like non-requirement. And additionally, the bullet point about alternative pricing option is a little vague to me. I'm just not, it's not super clear to me like what better value and better rates mean. But that said, I understand that like we wanna cast as wide a net as possible and that, yeah, if we don't get any bids, like we'll be in a world of hurt But yeah, I just wanted to make sure that, you know, if at all possible, we could emphasize a preference for free communication for jail residents. Otherwise, we might leave the door open to end up with another contract that harms our community. Thanks. That's it.

Thank you. Any questions for the registrant? Not seeing any. I will just note, I mean, and, you know, I think the Worst case scenario, we have the ability to pay the resident rate. So if somebody comes back and they don't provide a Dane County special rate because we're buying in bulk, we still have the ability to see what the resident rate is. I think, you know, via paths, you know, via paths contract, I actually don't want to on the other contracts. But I do think there's an ability for vendors and sincerely hope that all vendors apply. And some may choose to give us a better rate and some may not, but at least that option be available. And I think to kind of level the playing field on the vendor's understanding that we want a subsidized option, but the subsidized option isn't, necessarily going to be for the vendor just to give us something for free. That's just not realistic, because if they're giving us for free, that means they're making up for it by charging residents for a portion of it. So, you know, hopefully, again, that we get, you know, there may be some ability for them to do creative free stuff, and we should encourage their creative free stuff, but also understand if we're subsidizing this, what would they charge us? And, you know, I think this is a good attempt to get that, so... Any other questions, thoughts?

I have a question for the Sheriff and his team. Could you speak to, obviously in here, there's the administrative fee portion, what lays out, you know, quarter million dollars climbing every year for each term. Could you speak to what the currently, just I guess to paint some background as we continue to move forward and review this as a new supervisor, could you speak to what the current cost is like for the county? And if you have the figures, the total cost to the community as well?

Is that reference the reimbursement? I mean, we usually call it a reimbursement back to us for the work that we do on behalf of the contract. Is that what you're talking about, the cost of... what it has to be cost was for us to do the work for them and for them to reimburse us. Is that the question? The administrative fee?

Yes. Are you focusing on the annual administration fee that's talked about? Yes. Okay. Yes. So there is a part of the RFP from 2025. I'm not sure if it's in the version, the PDF version that's available. I'm not seeing it in there, but actually had a pretty good outline of the Sheriff's Department's previous you know, estimation of what staff time looked like for supporting this. But those numbers come from defined this amount of hours for this position as helping with this product, and the Sheriff's Department looking for reimbursement from the vendor for that. We're not currently getting reimbursed, at least at that 200 and almost close to $300,000 level. But during the RFP process in 2025, there was the goal of being reimbursed. for that. So I'm pretty sure that the Sheriff's Department or even I can provide that attachment so you can get a better look at that. But there is a document that breaks that out.

Gotcha. That makes sense. I read through all 50 whatever pages for the meeting and yeah, I didn't see that. So thank you for speaking to it.

Oops. So, Captain, Deputy Chief Nygaard, is there anything that I left out of that? I'm sorry. I'm trying to be helpful.

Nope. You said it exactly right. I'll get that chart and send it to you and you can distribute.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Thank you. I just had a question. Go ahead. Chief Deputy, when you're scoring on the sheriff, when you're Potentially scoring, hopefully.

We're not going to talk about scoring this evening. I want to talk about how they were scoring, just overall. How would you pick? I don't even want to go there. It's not our role as supervisors, and also we don't want to give information to vendors, etc.

We want to leave that part.

My apologies. I did just find the administrative fee document.

But I'll make sure everybody gets a copy. Awesome. Yes. That'd be appreciated.

Any other questions, thoughts on this? Awesome. Not seeing any. Thank you again to the Sheriff's Department for their work on this and for being here this evening. Oh, I said it quick. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

No, no, I'm sorry. I forgot. So what's your... realistic timeline for this. Obviously, you have a deadline at the back end where the other existing contract ends.

With purchasing, we'd be shooting for, looks like, try to get it posted by June 12th.

That's pretty good. So most of this work's already been done. your part of it to get it posted that quick.

Yeah, we'll have to get it to purchasing until they can post it by then.

How long would you give this usually, and would you give it more?

For when it's out?

On the street. Is that a purchasing decision or is that kind of a... Yeah, it goes to the purchasing's timetable.

We can't have rough timetables with it. But yeah, because there'll be a... It'll be posted out there, then it'll be a time that they'll have to come do a site visit. Oh, okay. The vendors will have to show up to come see what, you know, what the job is. And that's a mandatory for them. And then they'll have a date somewhere in July when the proposals will be due for them to submit. So if you could follow that. Okay. And then matching up all the, of course, the county board schedules.

Right. Well, I guess I'm just thinking of when you would get it back to score, when you would close it, that's really that part of it. When you would close the RFP, that's all.

Yeah, I'm guessing it probably ended July-ish. Okay.

I just wondered if that was going to be enough time, and you felt that you were confident in that?

Yeah, we're cooking along. So right now we're on a pretty good clip for matching up our timetables to get everything done on time. Sounds good. Thanks.

Thank you. Any other questions?

All right. I think this is more a question for you, just given the last question. As someone who hasn't been through the budget process yet, I know we're getting going in August and kind of rolling forward. If the way things are kind of shaping, this is complete speculation, obviously. Do you think that it's something that we'd be able to have in mind when it comes to shaping the budget going forward? Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think based on timelines that we should have a pretty rough idea by, you know, the end of the summer of what this looks like and be able to work from there.

Fantastic. Okay. So we'll have all the, at least most of the information we'll need in order to make the decision on that. Great. Great.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Sheriff's Department. And we will now move on to our presentations. So we'll start with Family Court Services. Thank you so much for your patience. Hopefully you learned something.

It's always good to hear what everybody's up to.

Stephanie, we'll pull up your slides. Please go ahead and introduce yourselves.

Well, there's all my contact information in case you're ready to reach out. And the next slide. Stephanie, thank you. So I'm trying to keep the presentation short because I know this is just an introductory session for you guys. So I really do want you to understand how valuable family court services is in the eyes of the judiciary who work in the family court arena. We're able to help them spend less time hearing things because we are able to clarify things. We are also there to really help parents figure out ways to help themselves and their children navigate a difficult time in their lives when they're divorcing or separating. What we need to do is make sure that the child's wellbeing is prioritized. Sometimes the parents are so engaged in their conflict that they forget to think about the children and what the children might need. So the children become very vulnerable. We're located on the second floor of the courthouse and you're all welcome to come anytime. We're there every day, the doors are open. which I think is one of the special things about our office. We are there. There's somebody to answer questions or redirect people to other parts of the courthouse. We're also one of the few places, according to callers that we get, that a person answers the phone. And often the calls aren't for us, but they're for other places, and we're able to point them in that right direction. But people are always really glad to hear a human voice. And we really exist as part of the statute that requires a family court services department. And the best part is that the statutes also require the family court to look at the best interest of children. which is a difficult thing to figure out sometimes, but I think you got an attachment of the peach sheet. We call it the peach sheet. That's the explanation of the study. And I think the most important part of that is the second side that has the 14 factors that come right out of statute that we're required to follow that helps the judges determine what the best interest of children might be. What we do and don't do is confusing sometimes. Another valuable resource that we offer to our community is we have a counselor who's on call during business days, business hours. And they're available to answer questions, sometimes listening to somebody that's going through a really traumatic event. Maybe there was supposed to be an exchange of their child, and it didn't happen, and they may not even know where the other parent or their child is, and it's very upsetting. And counselors are able to kind of help them calm down and think about what next steps might be. We're also the largest family court services office in the state. And often people are calling us for information about what our process is. We've trained other counties in the brief focused assessment process. Often people get us mixed up with child protective services, family court services, people, families, you know, we get kind of jumbled together. But we are not an emergency service, right? We don't investigate abuse. We evaluate families. So we are not child protective services. We don't take children away. Often people are very frightened to come into the family court arena. We are there to help strengthen parent-child relationships and make sure that kids' needs are being met, but in a completely different way than Child Protective Services. So the first thing that we do when a family is referred is have them come to our parent education class. It's kind of a misnomer. It's really an orientation to the process of family court. And it's our first opportunity to encourage the parents to participate. build a positive co-parenting relationship. That's what we know is the best indicator of how children will do with these adjustments is how the parents are able to get along. So the more conflictual the parent's relationship is, the more difficult adjustment the child's going to have. After we have the class, we offer mediation, which is two parents working with one counselor to try to figure out how to manage legal custody, which is the decision-making process about where the child's going to school, who their pediatrician is going to be, non-emergency medical care both parents can do, but non-emergency medical care is a custodial decision where it might be joint custody, it might be sole custody or something in between. There's also custodial decisions regard religious upbringing. It's also about children getting their driver's license. getting married before 18 or joining the military before 18. And luckily, I haven't had either of those come up that I remember, the last two. They turn 18 so quickly. So this is a time for parents to come together. The parents who know the child, who know each other, whether they like each other or not, might know each other's families to come up with an agreement about where the child's going to be when and who's going to make these big decisions. Then we're able to write up a document that we supply to the parents and they have time to review that. If they still agree to that, we forward it to the judge and it's generally signed into an order. This takes that case off the hot plate for family court, right? The judge can meet with them, make sure that's their agreement, and they're done with that piece and can just focus on the financial pieces. When mediation is not successful, the case moves on for an evaluation or a brief focused assessment. So the evaluation process is what the PEACH sheet with the 14 factors talks about. And that's very in-depth. It requires... meetings with the parents, it requires observing the parents and children together. Sometimes home visits, a lot of collateral information is gathered from police department from schools. It's very comprehensive, as opposed to a brief focused assessment, which is a specific laser focus on one question, like how does this parents addiction impact their parenting? So we always are trying to get things synthesized so we know exactly what we're supposed to be looking at. And this helps us to assist the judges in making informed decisions that prioritize the best interest of the child, not what either parent wants or which parent has an attorney or a bigger house, but what's really best for the child. How do we help them build strong relationships with both parents? So, Our office is structured with licensed mental health professionals who are always looking for solutions, helping parents to try to reach their solutions. So it's not a judge saying, you will do this. It's the parents figuring it out. Okay, I don't like you very much, but I know you're really great at coaching soccer. So it makes sense for you to have the soccer weekends or the practice nights. Parents have the capability to figure these things out together. So we really encourage that. We also try to address systemic bias by having conversations with parents about things that we might not know. Things that might be happening in their family traditions that we might not know. We always want to know more about what we don't know. We strive to promote diverse family structures staying intact as much as possible so that families are getting fair and compassionate support so they can thrive even in the face of divorce or separation or a child when they really don't know each other. Parents have to continue to learn things too. Our clients come from a variety of backgrounds. Increasingly, they are struggling with financial issues, or we have the other end of the spectrum where they have a lot of money, a lot of resources. We have a lot of families that are struggling with mental health or addiction issues. We have families that are dealing with domestic violence situations, maybe currently, maybe in the past. And how do we help them figure out those situations and keep everyone safe? Our clients, you know, really, it's a challenging process. It's confusing to us sometimes the family court process, you know, we're often asking the commissioners and the judges, how do you want this to go? What is the next step? Parents sometimes aren't participating with us. And that can be for a variety of reasons. So we need the court to help us figure out what are we supposed to do next? So our focus is really on the vulnerable children who are managing stressful family situations while their parents are also navigating the complex court system. So again, the quality of the co-parenting relationship is the paramount concern that helps us understand better the best interest of the child. So our second slide. So this is just a self-explanatory slide. I'm not going to spend much time on it. Our general purpose revenue is our biggest budget support. And we also get money from licenses like a marriage license or family court filing fees. And we also charge fees for some of our services. And so that I love that little square on the side. It details that most of our budget is personnel and the rest is operations and a tiny bit for contractual expenses, which is our new database, which I'm not going to bore you with. But if you want to call and ask me about legal files, I'm happy to share the good, the bad and the ugly. We're still learning. So slide three. All right, there we go. I'm so excited because our newest staff member is Patty, our clerk four, and she was able to make these diagrams. Some of you might remember a couple of years ago, I was excited when I could add photos. to the slideshow, but Patty has actually figured out how to do graphs. So I think this is just really a great picture of things that are going on. So our referrals from January to May are that green line on the top of the horizontal bar. So we're right on target for about where we were last year, maybe even a little bit further. The pie chart also a work of art, thank you, Patty, shows that most of our referrals are mediation. And then the yellow part are the studies, which are what take up most of our time. It's great that our blue part is bigger than our yellow part, right? Because some of our mediations are getting people out of the system. helping them figure things out, and they don't need to go on to the study. While the study takes up most of our time, research actually indicates that maybe 8% of families that are getting divorced or parents that are not married and separating or parents that have never been together but share a child, that it's only 8% to 10% that might be experiencing a family evaluation. And we kind of start to feel like, oh, that's everybody out there is needing this intensive intervention. So luckily, that's not true. And I think our graph portrays that. Also, we do some relocation mediations and relocation studies. And those are expedited to try to help families relocate. help a parent who might need to accept a job offer in another state, or even a neighboring state, and how that's going to look for the family. So that's what that graph is. And we can go on to the next slide. Okay, so urgent needs might be a little dramatic, but not really. We've already been approved. It's in our capital budget for a remodel. And one of the most exciting parts of that is to have improved space for our parent-child observations. It's a very small room. Just today, we had four children under the age of six. And it's a small room and we transitioned the parents in and out. It was very loud and chaotic. We just don't have a lot of space in there. And so when we flip the rooms and use the current playroom as the observation room, And our current conference room as the playroom, it'll be able to meet the needs of older children as well as younger children. It's really, you know, we have a play kitchen. You know, that's not really fun for 10, 11, 12-year-olds. And so the bigger playroom will give us the opportunity to observe different families and maybe have them do a project together that might give us more information about how they interact with each other. Also on here is a safe exchange center. We deal with a lot of families that maybe have a violent history or just are not very polite in their language with one another. And so it would be nice if we had a place where for safe exchanges. We did have one years ago that was funded by American Family Children's Hospital and it was over by the Rainbow Project, but the funding ran out on the grant and it just wasn't picked up. I did a little sleuthing and Wausau, they have a a safe exchange at a police department with designated spaces and cameras. And I do get calls from various police departments in our county where people are like, we keep taking care of these people because sometimes people always come in or whatever. So it would be nice if there was a designated safe place where kids could be dropped off and picked up by another parent without the parents crossing paths. And that would be a community based service. I'm not saying it's the county's responsibility. But just something I think people should think about. We also are frequently recommending that people will engage in therapeutic services. And there's just such a shortage. There's waiting lists. And again, I'm not sure what the answer is to that. I just want to make sure people are aware of that, that sometimes people need help, and they're not able to get it for several months. So our goals are always to reduce staff turnover. From 2001 until 2024, I had a 50% turnover in professional staff, and that was directly related to people wanting to work from home. and not being allowed to do that after COVID settled down. So that has stabilized and we've been fully staffed with professional counselors since 2024. So I'm very happy about that because it's a big learning curve for counselors. We've also had a lot of we've had two retirements and then one front office staff person who moved out of state. So our front office has had significant turnover. And I've learned a lot about how things operate and have been really committed to trying to make things more efficient. And so part of. Part of reducing staff turnover and increasing staff learning is to decrease burnout, right? It's a high burnout field. We get tired. All we hear about all day are complaints whether that's from the parents we're working with, sometimes the children we're working with, the attorneys we work with, and occasionally the judiciary. So we hear a lot of complaining. We don't get a lot of pats on the back. So the burnout is a real thing. And so how can we avoid that? And again, I think that's continued learning and providing those experiences for counselors to feel like, oh, maybe I do know a little bit what I'm doing. because we get people that are trying to convince us that we don't know anything. I have a little chart there so you can see our head counts. I'm there at the top. And then we have a clerk four, that's Patty, the graph maker. And we also have a position that's vacant. And that in the last budget cycle was also vacant and was changed to a clerk one, two, instead of a clerk three, and was also dropped from a full-time position to 0.6. And I've been trying to figure out what the job description would even look like. But I've been spending a lot of time learning what goes on out there and trying to figure it out. And then the clinical staff is at the bottom there. We have eight counselors.

I should have caught this, so I apologize. Can you give us what the abbreviations are? Can you tell us what the abbreviations mean?

Oh, sure. So APSW are Advanced Practice Social Workers. LPC are Licensed Professional Counselors. LMFT are Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists. And LCSW is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. And those are out of the Department of Safety and Professional Services designations. And our staff is all master's level clinicians. That's not true in every Family Court Services office. And one of the reasons that's really important is because the judges depend on us to be expert witnesses, which means that we can share hearsay. So we're allowed to say mom said this and dad said this and the therapist said this and the school said this. The often that relates to school personnel, police officers not having to take time out of their jobs and come in and testify at court because we're able to share that information. So the unique situation that the kids we work with are in, you know, I know I keep talking about it because it's really important. They're in such a loyalty bind. They love both parents. They want to love both parents, but sometimes the parents' conflict makes that really difficult, and kids feel like their only option is to tell parents what they think the parent wants to hear. So it's really difficult situations for the kids. Okay. All right, I think I'm gonna go on to the next slide. So when we're looking ahead and thinking about things to do, and I was really happy to have a conversation. We don't think that's the best little clip art to have in there because it's not a very diverse family. A lot of the families we work with are much more diverse than a mom and a dad and a boy and a girl. So just wanted to point that out. So some of the things that come to mind are, is there a way we could triage the family court cases in a different way? And I'm just starting to learn about that option and talking to some of the other counties about how they do it. One of the problems we have is that our caseloads are so much higher than some of the other counties. But I think that's something that we'll be looking at in the future. Sometimes we get cases where parents don't cooperate with us because they don't really want our services. They just want a child support order to change, which is going to be difficult if they don't cooperate with us. So are there other ways we can manage some of those kinds of cases? Community networking, like I would love to be more involved in our domestic violence communities, involved with the Urban League and some of the classes and things that they provide and being more available. But with the turnover that we've had, that's been really difficult. I think it's important to, you know, find out if people think that's an important thing, to have a safe exchange. Maybe that's just us with our narrow piece of the population. And how do we make sure that we're giving people the information that they need to get through the process. And if we're recommending that people do therapy, and the judges are encouraging that, but parents can't do it because they don't have the resources, that's not going to be helpful to people. Again, I'm not sure what the solution is, but we're going to keep talking about it. And also one of the things I'm very proud of is that we do answer the phone. And we are there in the courthouse to point people in the right direction. So our technology, we're using more technology, and hopefully that's making us more efficient. It's definitely going to give us more accurate numbers, which are going to help with do we need to set some higher tier fees. If you look at the court order that was attached to the presentation, on the second page it lists the fee scheduling. And Just today, I took in two different or three different cases that had $1,000 per parent fees. So I'm wondering if maybe we could have some higher tiers to bring in more revenue. We see a lot of parents that are pro se. And so I think it is appropriate that we are waiving the tier one fees. And I don't know if that part needs to be raised. Again, with our new legal file system, we should be able to pull more data. We had a rough transition where we pulled data from our old system to the new one. So we're still going through and kind of cleaning that up. So I'm hoping as the fall approaches and the budget ramps up, we'll be able to have better numbers for everybody. Sometimes there's still roadblocks for our clients. They can't work Zoom. They don't know how to turn on the microphone. And we do offer the option that they can come into the office and we'll help set them up. So we're trying the best we can to provide these vital and critical services that they need. Does anybody have any questions before I go to the last slide?

I think the last slide is questions, isn't it?

Well, sort of. The last slide is I'm ready for you guys to come to FCS, right? I always say this, but I'm happy to make time for you even outside of office hours if you want to run over and take a tour. Again, I could talk about this all day long. But I'm happy to make arrangements for you to come in during the business day, outside of the business day, before a PP&J meeting or a board meeting. You're welcome to come. And yes, are there any questions?

Thank you so much. This was great. Questions from the committee? Supervisor Belgian, go ahead.

Thanks for your presentation. In the beginning, what's the first meeting called? I don't know.

The parent education? Yeah. Is that required? Or when does that come into your system?

Yeah. When does that come in? Does everything you have happen post-verdict, post-trial or post-decision?

before that right that's what i thought yeah they're all we're all trying to get them to figure things out or get them closer so maybe they agree to some things but not other things so that what the court has to pay attention to is smaller and takes up less time so you get involved once there's a filing is that sort of right when somebody's getting divorced and has children or parents there's a paternity judgment the parents aren't married but they have a child together And sometimes the parents have a child together and don't really know each other. Sure.

But they would be coming in case they want to change their arrangement, right? Or if they didn't have an arrangement. But if they didn't have one, how did the courts get involved? How do you get involved?

Often with the paternity judgment, right? Like people come in, well, they just had a baby, and one parent doesn't want to give the baby to somebody they don't know.

Now I get your point.

Okay.

I had something else, but somebody else. Other supervisors? I do.

So I would like to know, what is the training like for your staff? Because they seem, like you said, they're very qualified, very educated. So how do they keep that, you know, stay on top of everything?

Exactly. Because as the expert witness, you know, we want to be able to say, well, Dr. Ben Garber says... that children need both parents or, you know, we need to know these things that are going on in the field. And so one way that we do that, our licenses require us to have, I can't remember if it's 25 or 29 hours of training every two years to renew our licenses. Okay. And so that's something that we always look to do. There is a group that really focuses on family court training for family court professionals who do this weird niche work. And that's through the Wisconsin Interprofessional Committee on Divorce. They have a conference every spring. Disclaimer, I am a board member. So I get to help plan those events. There's also the American Association of Family and Conciliatory Courts, and that's actually an international group. And they just had a conference in Seattle where they had several days of presentations about which direction our field's going in and what new avenues of training might be happening. So whenever we can, we like to send people. This year, I sent one person to Seattle. Last year, we sent two people to New Orleans. And that was basically because we had vacant positions. We had a little extra funds we could distribute in a different way. It had been years before we had sent somebody. And one of those counselors last year had a scholarship from AFCC. Yeah, and we also do, through AFCC, our membership in AFCC, we get to do various trainings throughout the year. They have an in-person conference in the fall. They also do Lunch and Learns, which are like one-hour programs that are only $15 a month with our membership. And then we can sign up for those, and we also have access to those after the fact through the archive on the AFCC website. And we also pull in people from the community to talk about, we had somebody come and talk to us about a family service of Madison and what services they could provide to support the families that we work with and other agencies, supervised visitation programs, domestic violence programs, just to make sure we know what's going on currently in the community. Because there's a lot of changes going on with funding and so forth. And sometimes we just help each other out, right? Like maybe I had more experience with this kind of family. And we do a lot of staffing cases to make sure that, well, would you say the same thing if it was the mom doing that instead of the dad? Or what if the mom was black and the dad was white? Or would this look different? You know, we try to challenge each other as much as we can to look at the whole picture.

And you had mentioned earlier about having a master's, you know, your team having a master's degrees and being able to be expert witnesses. Is that what you said? So what exactly does that mean? Does it mean they just can, like you said, reference what someone else said? When you say someone else, what do you mean?

Right. So when a parent testifies in court, they can't say... well, they can say it, but it's not considered, right? They can say, well, my child says they don't like the other parent. Okay, well, that's hearsay. So somebody, an attorney could object to that, or the judge might point out, you know, that's hearsay. Stick to what you know to be true. And so we're able to share that, right? Like, well, the child told us that They want more time with this parent. Or they would really like to spend a week at their grandparents' cottage in the summer with their grandparents. We can share that kind of information because we're considered by the court to be an expert witness. Does that make sense? Yes. It's getting late. Tell me if I'm not making sense.

What's the name of the licensure that you were talking about? The name of the... You mentioned a licensure that your staff needs to go through with like our requirements for training and recertification.

Yeah, so that's from the little flow chart.

The LCSW and all the others.

APSW, those are all through the Department of Safety and Professional Services. Okay.

Great. That's all the SPS.

Yep.

Awesome. I guess kind of to go back to that pie chart that you had, and I apologize if you explained it earlier, it is getting late. I'm wondering what the difference between mediation and evaluation is. And you mentioned that evaluation is a much more involved process. Does one flow into the other? Does it depend on the kind of legal situation that they're in?

Okay, so mediation is just the parents working with a counselor to come to an agreement.

Okay.

If they don't come to an agreement, we let the court know, and then generally the court refers them back for the more comprehensive study process. So usually mediation first, and then the study if it's necessary.

Gotcha. So you help them figure it out together or you go to fact finding to let the courts decide.

Right. But at any time during the study process, parents can come to an agreement. I've even been on the stand testifying and attorneys have asked for a break and went out in the hall and settled the case. So they came to their own agreement before the judge made a ruling, which the judges love that. Right. The judge never meets the kids. Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you. Any other questions? Anybody on Zoom? Hey, not seeing any. Thank you so much for coming this evening. Thank you. Okay, go ahead.

Do you have another question? Go ahead. So with the different positions, do they have different responsibilities then in the process?

All the counselors do mediations and studies and relocation mediations and relocation studies.

So they sort of came in with those licenses to the department, okay. So either they just kind of divide everybody up equally or as they come in.

I try to do them equally, but you know, one case is not always equal to the other. Oh, absolutely, no. And I have business cards if anybody wants one.

Thank you. Yeah, I'll take one. I have a question for Chair. Sure. Um, I was going to do this is a question for court counsel. Maybe, um, you dropped. Thank you so much. There are seven members of PP and J. What a walking core would I would a negative quorum potentially be within this committee meeting.

since four could be could we we have could can we wait to that to the end we have is there an issue right now i'm asking specifically for tours if i was to say reach out to supervisor larson or one of the other members yeah let's still talk about that afterwards because we have we have a presentation that i'd love to get done and send them home and then we can we can talk about that some more great the last thing i'm going to say is the back of our business cards have a qr code that'll take you right to the fcs website andy thank you so much thank you for being here thank you

And I thank my young staff members for that.

So I've invited Joshua here this evening. One of the things that we play a role in is the claims process. And what I wanted to do is make sure that we understood the process, especially because sometimes something odd happens with claims, and I'd rather us know before something odd happens with claims. So why don't you introduce yourself? Thank you so much for waiting. Thank you for being here this evening and explaining to the members on the committee how claims works. No problem.

My name's Joshua Cotillier. I'm the risk manager for the county. So, Stephanie, I did have a presentation, so. So, tonight I'll be talking to you about PP&J's role and responsibilities in considering recommendations to disallow claims brought against Dane County. My goal for tonight's presentation is to provide a practical overview of the claims process so that you can better evaluate the disallowance recommendation presented to you. You can see on the first slide there, my contact information is there. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have additional questions before future meetings. So how the claim begins, the notice. So under 893.80, a person seeking to assert a claim against Dane County must first provide written notice to the county 120 days after the event or the incident that gave rise to the claim. This notice, sometimes also known as a demand, must be submitted to the Dane County Clerk's Office. The Clerk's Office date stamps the notice and forwards it to Risk Management. The date stamp establishes the official receipt date by the county of that notice or claim. The notice or demand also should include enough information to investigate and evaluate the demand being made so a determination can be made. A special note, there is no special form or format, county form or format that is required in order to bring notice or a demand against the county.

Next slide, please.

So the investigation. So as part of the investigation and evaluation process, Risk Management worked closely with the Wisconsin Municipal Mutual Insurance Company, also known as WMIC. WMIC is a mutual insurance company, meaning it's owned by its policyholders rather than outside shareholders. Think your AMFAMs here. Those are outside shareholder insurance companies. WMIC's members include Dane County, City of Madison, and 15 other cities and counties in two special districts. All notices that are brought against the county are thoroughly investigated by WMIC using all available information to objectively determine whether Dane County was involved, whether a loss occurred, or whether a legal offense or immunities may apply. So an example I'll use here for you that you may see for a disallowance is a highway vehicle, a claimant alleges that a highway vehicle kicked up a rock off the road and it broke the windshield. We get these with some frequency. So determine if the county was involved. We can do that by, for example, many of the highway vehicles have GPS trackers, so we can see was the vehicle even there at the date, time, and location the claimant says. Did a compensable loss occur? We can do everything from look at photographs that are submitted, repair estimates, crash report by law enforcement, even speaking to the claimant themselves to determine if a loss did occur. And any applicable immunities or defenses in the case of the rock example I'm using here, municipalities have immunity for rocks kicked up that were already on the road. That's part of the reason, for example, trucks say stay to back 200 feet, things of that nature. So if it was already there, there's immunity for that.

Next slide, please.

So recommendation, so let's go to the pay or deny. So WMIC investigates, and if it leads to supporting that Dane County is liable, WMIC will recommend a settlement and then pending risk management approval. So if the claimant accepts that settlement offer, WMIC will have the claimant sign a waiver, and then make a payment to them, and then the claimant will be closed. If WMIC determines that Dane County was not liable, WMIC will recommend that the claim be disallowed. Then next risk management will review WMIC's recommendation. If risk management agrees that the recommendation is to be disallowed, the recommendation is then forwarded to Stephanie for this committee's review and for questions. If there are no questions, then the disallowance moves onto the board for a vote.

If, next slide, please.

Thank you. If the PP&J, you, the committee, have additional questions that cannot be answered before the committee or you want to put on the agenda to discuss, then it's brought and it's on the agenda and I come here and I speak to you. Please note that you, as PP&J committee, have the right to deny or accept any disallowance recommendation that is submitted to you. If you, PP&J, and ultimately the board vote to approve a claim that WMIC has recommended be disallowed, please note that there are some potential financial consequences to the county. For example, depending on the particulars or specifics of the claim itself, WMIC will not pay for any costs associated with that claim. Also, just as important though, just because a claim is voted to be disallowed, that does not stop the claimant from pursuing additional legal action afterwards. So again, let me repeat that. If you disallow a claim, even if there are questions, the claimant still has the ability to take that to state courts and have other legal challenges. It doesn't just stop here. Sometimes there are concerns if you think it just kills the claim. No, it does not. There's other avenues still available, even if you choose to disallow. That disallowance, vote for a disallowance by PP&J and or the board is known as a statutory disallowance. Statutory disallowance is important. It provides six months leeway for the claimant to then seek those additional legal actions if that individual so chose, chooses to do so. If a claimant files with the state courts more than six months after the receipt of a denial or disallowance or without first filing with the county, the state courts may dismiss the claim. Next slide, please. Couple of notes about closed session and some of the things that come up in claims. So if PP&J asks for claim-specific legal reasoning or litigation strategies under Wisconsin Stat Street 1985, 19.285, you are authorized but not required to go into what's called closed session. In general, closed session, the provision of closed session applies when conferring about legal issues related to a disallowed claim, whether it's verbal or written, if there's any talk about strategies or respect to if there's litigation or potential for litigation against the county if the claim were to be disallowed. Some examples of likely open session questions that are fine to ask, and you get this information as part of the disallowance recommendation. Appropriate would be, how much is the claimant demanding? Another one would be, when was the notice received? Some questions that would come up that I would recommend closed session on would be, what legal analysis led to the recommendation to disallow the claim? Again, that gets into strategy, that gets into other things that is privileged and would want to keep in closed session. Next slide, please. This is from a risk management perspective. Risk management's focus is to reduce risk and support the preservation of life, property, public resources, and reputation. This claims review process that I discussed with you is just one part of the broader risk management function. This matrix that I have here shows just one of the tools that risk management uses to identify and proactively assess and manage risk across not only claims, but general operations as a whole. That concludes my presentation. Do you have any questions that I can answer?

Supervisors, any questions?

Supervisor Belgin? Yep. So the process now is that the claims just go right to the board. You know what I'm talking about, right, Brother?

Yeah, so, yeah, could you talk a little bit about that? So for the new members that haven't been on PP&J, may not understand how that email from Stephanie works, could you talk about that a little bit clearer? In which part do you mean? So Stephanie will send it.

So if you have questions or if you don't have questions.

So both, I mean, so.

Yeah, it will come to PP&J and you can vote on it. Only if we have questions. So Stephanie. You can actually do both. You can do both. It's what you decide. If you want to put it on the agenda as well.

So what happens is Stephanie will send PP&J, the committee, a note and say, here are the claims for the meeting. If anybody wants this at the meeting, let Stephanie know, and then it gets added to our agenda where we can discuss it, we can vote on it. But if that doesn't happen, and most of the time it doesn't happen, then it proceeds to the board.

I know it was a change in how we did it. Carlos, do you get involved in all, do you represent the county in all these claims?

Thankfully, no. I work closely with risk management and outside counsel sometimes in some of the more egregious claims. At this stage, though, I think if PP&J were to have questions about a claim, then I work closely with Joshua to sort of review what WMIC has provided. so that I can step in here and give you, if you wanted to sort of speak in closed session, I can step in and sort of relay what I've learned from WMIC's legal reasoning, my own sort of, throwing my own two cents on it as well. Let's see, so I'm sure it's got to be at least three.

So then their attorneys, their lawyers take care of representing the county, WMIC's? Yep. If it goes to the state, if they file from the state, they get a denial, and then we're sort of out of it, other than being on the hook.

I get that part. So typically, outside counsel isn't appointed through WMIC until the claim becomes an actual lawsuit. And at that point, then Joshua will get a notice of the actual lawsuit. He will work with WMIC very closely to appoint the appropriate outside counsel. Outside counsel will step in and represent us from that point on.

And I guess other different claims for different. I mean, I've never seen him in different. Departments where, depending on what the circumstances, I'm trying to think somebody falls at a park or a county park. Is that still comes the same process?

It still will be the same process. Slip and fall of the accident.

Yeah, those are all those all come through the same whatever department it's through. If it's if it's county trucks, highway, it's okay. Correct.

WMIC was characterized as an insurance in a way.

Is that fair? Is that accurate? Yes. WMIC is an insurance company.

Okay. If in a purely hypothetical situation, if there were to go to a state lawsuit and the findings were to be against the county, would the county be liable for those funds or would it go to WMIC and then we have some fee that we pay to WMIC that would increase potentially? So the county does have a deductible.

on general liability claims. So the money would pay up to that deductible and then WMIC would pay anything over that deductible. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Then just so you know, that's $100,000. Great.

I have a question for you. If there's a claim in front of PP&J and I disagree with the denial and I convince my colleagues that the denial is wrong, where does the money come from to pay that? Is there money sitting somewhere to pay that? Do we have funds to pay when we don't agree with the decision?

There are... PP&J's job is really to... accept the disallowance or deny the disallowance. It does not have the ability to say you should pay or not pay. If funds were to come from somewhere for some reason, those funds would be found. But again, that comes down to the specifics of the claim.

So what happens if we deny a denial?

If you deny a denial, what can happen when a situation would be then it runs out to 120 days and then it's disallowed anyways is one situation.

Okay. So is there a situation where we can say you need to approve this? No.

Again, approving or denial is the role that this committee has.

Approving the denial is the role.

Approving the disallowance or denying the disallowance is the role this committee has.

But it ends up in the same situation regardless.

You're in oversight, yes. But this committee does not have the role to say you must pay this claim. Okay.

Other questions?

Carlson, do we have that? Was it last term? Or was it two terms? I remember there was one that way. I don't know if you just go with that for the new folks too.

Let's not revisit that one.

And again, a disallowance by this committee or not does not stop the individual, the claimant from making further legal action. So, and that's maybe more to what the supervisor was getting into was, you know, because that would go to then the court system. Right.

Is that what happened with that one? There was a part, right? That was the break-in. Yeah, that one's still pending.

Any other questions?

Sorry, it all came back to me.

Thank you so much for coming here and explaining the process. Greatly appreciate it. Information is in the slides if anybody has any questions. We look forward to working with you this term. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we're going to stay on presentations for a moment and talk about the question about quorums, just so we're clear about how tours could work. So we do anything we shouldn't be doing.

Yep. So, Supervisor Trucios, you're correct that it is potential, however unlikely, that two people from the same committee of a seven-body committee could result in a negative quorum. I find this interesting, but it's not really going to apply in most cases. That would only happen, though, let's say if two individuals decided to vote against something. And they're clearly not the majority, so you would think you would be fine. But let's say at the meeting where something was before them, only the bare quorum showed up four. So then you would have inadvertently created a negative quorum. So that was interesting for me, Amy. But your direct question is whether or not two people on a tour would create a negative quorum. I don't think so because, again, it's not necessarily that two of you are together. It's the fact that there's nothing really before you to vote on. So these tours would be fine if, however, four of you wanted to do the same tour. We would probably notice that just saying there's no business that's going to be involved and just let the public know that there's a potential that a quorum of PP&J of four of you might be present. We wouldn't do that in the off chance that a negative quorum was going to happen or anything like that because, again, there's nothing really specifically before the body regarding these tours. Okay, perfect.

Thank you. Thank you for the question. Appreciate it. All right, future meeting dates and items. Our next meeting is June 30th. Let everybody know we have now done four out of a total of 12 presentations, so we've got eight additional presentations still ahead of us, so we can learn more about the different departments that we have oversight over. I believe we're probably going to have three at our next one, trying to finalize that, and then we'll Have another meeting July 21st and August 18th, a quiet summer, which hopefully gets everybody prepared for a very, very busy fall. We have not finalized our budget discussion dates, but as of now, and there's a fairly good chance, we have scheduled a meeting for every Tuesday in October. So just keep that in mind that our budget meetings are likely every Tuesday in October. We may not need one of those meetings, but pencil that into your calendar. That's a heads up. I'm trying to finalize that with... HHN to see what they're doing and make sure that we don't conflict because a lot of times our stuff, uh, some of our budget amendments, um, are, are similar to theirs or, or have a, uh, a component of theirs. So, um, uh, I will get back to everybody the second I have dates. Um, I see a supervisor Yang, um, has her hand up. Um, yes, chair. Yeah.

Yes. Thank you.

I just wanted to let you know that I will not be at the June 30th meeting. Thank you so much for letting me know. Um, So if there's anything in particular, anybody wants to see on future agendas, certainly let me know. But expect to know on the meetings on the 30th, 21st and 18th, respectively. We will continue with presentations at the end of the meeting and then would have whatever items are referred to us at those meetings. um if there are no questions or thoughts on future meeting items and dates again people can mail me at any time um as well um i'll move on to the last remaining please appreciate that folks are moving along yeah i mean it could be well i would think with the sheriff you might want to put them alone separately or what we could just say Public comment on items not on the agenda?

Go ahead. Quick question on schedule. The potential maybe meetings in October, is there like a time I should throw on my calendar? That'd be 5.30. Okay, 5.30.

It'll almost definitely be 5.30 for our meetings, yeah.

Great, thank you.

Yeah, and then those will be when we're talking about budget amendments, and we have to have two meetings for budget amendments, and... All right. Then such other business as a lot by law, not seeing any. And now I would entertain a motion for adjournment.

Thank you, everybody. Have a great night.