Homeless Issues Committee - Regular Meeting

Okay, I'm going to go ahead and start this meeting of Public Protection Judiciary Committee.

Carlos, if you can call the roll. Chair Furman. Present. Furman here. Supervisor Gray. Gray here. Gray here. Supervisor Larson.

Larson here.

Larson here. Supervisor Lewis. Lewis present. Lewis here. Supervisor Trucios. Trucios is absent. Supervisor Veldrin. Here. Here. Odwin here. And Yang is excused. Chair, we have quorum. Great. And Trucios let me know that they would not be here. Oh, okay.

So excused.

Okay. The next item on our agenda is consideration of the minutes. Can I get a motion? I'll move. Great. Any questions, comments, suggestions, changes on the minutes? Not seeing any. So I'll assume approval by unanimous consent unless I hear otherwise. Next portion of our agenda is fund transfers. The first item is 2026, FTR 004, Office of Justice Reform Fund Transfer. Pretty straightforward. We do have the director here if anybody has any questions. Mike, we can take a motion and go from there. Somebody? Yes, Jess. Supervisor Larson just moved approval, I believe. Thank you. She did. Any questions for the director? Any comments on this item? None for me. I'm not seeing any unless I hear otherwise. I will assume approval by unanimous consent. And we will move on to the next item on our agenda, which is 2026 FTR 005, Fund Transfer for Vehicle Purchase. I see we have representatives from, we have the Sheriff here with us this evening. Sheriff, thank you for joining us. Would you be able to explain this item? I know it's a little bit more complicated.

Yeah, thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to talk on this. I'll pass this on to Chief Deputy Chris Nygaard to talk about the details of that. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Sheriff. The fund transfer is for a boat we're looking to buy 2025 end of season to replace a current boat we have that has a fuel leak in the sealed hull, and to fix it, it's cost prohibitive. The money that was in the account, existing account, was set aside for a motor for this boat anyways, but the repairs would be somewhere in the area of $40,000 to get it fixed, and then we'd still need the motor, or we could purchase this This other boat at the end of year sales for $67,500, I believe. So we just need the difference. I think it's like $37,000 move from our vehicle fleet maintenance line over to the boat line to be able to take advantage of this deal for this boat and basically get a brand new boat with a motor instead of just a motor and pay cost of repairs.

Thank you. We'll go ahead and do a motion, and then I'll take questions if anybody has any questions. Anybody want to make a motion? Still move. Thank you. Any questions for the Sheriff's Department? Not seeing any discussion.

I have a question. Sorry.

Go ahead, Supervisor.

Yeah, I was trying to get into the chat. Chris, do you have on that budget line, is that are all those, are all those funds accounted for, for vehicles that you planned on purchasing or how, and do you generally, I mean, is that always when you put in the budget and the sheriff can jump into if he needs to, um, that's for a specific amount of vehicles or, or. Yeah. Like the, like a, yeah, like an encumbered amount.

Um, it's, uh, of course it's a, a rolling cycle of replacements for all of our items. So it's like nonstop, uh, drawing out of that account. It just happens to be we are still doing well. Last year, we actually made a decision for the budget to not ask for as much for the capital, and we're going to try to make use, keep pace with our vehicles with a little bit less money. And so that's part of that money that we're still doing very well with. Of course, you'll probably see a budget request this year for some funds. But, yes, it's a rolling amount of money for the repairs on the vehicles. Like, for example, my car needs – that I drive has a flat tire, so we'll be paying for a new tire for that thing. So we are constantly getting our cars repaired so that money is available. It's encumbered, but a lot of the future encumberments, we don't know. But the fleet assets manager thought this would be a safe amount of money to take out because they would have been stuck with us anyways trying to get the boat fixed as well.

Were you planning on retiring the boat anyway soon?

No, we were going to try to do it our county way and try to stretch it as far as we could. But when we hit this, it was like a fuel line leak somewhere in the sealed hole. It's an unsinkable boat, but it's an unsinkable fire hazard now. But the new boat we are trying to procure is an aluminum frame, not that those two are connected. It's just... some, you know, just unlucky. I mean, it's 10 years old. We put a lot of miles on the boat. Sure.

And you only have one boat?

No, we have a number of boats. Oh, that's right.

I was like, really? We're running around. Oh, no. Three lakes with one or two lakes. Okay.

That's all I need to know. Thanks. You're welcome. Supervisor, any other questions? Discussion? Not seeing any, unless I hear otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent. And we'll move on to our next item. Next item, our referrals. First item on the list is 2026-OA-005. I do not see anybody here that can talk to this. So if I can get a motion, I'd be happy to talk about this since I was on lakes and watershed and spent a lot of time as part of the engagement. We do also have the Sheriff's Department who may be able to provide some information or answer some questions. Thank you, Supervisor Larson, for the motion. I am going to provide a little bit of background on this. Our ordinances for how recreational vehicles can be used on the lakes in Dane County. Our current ordinance is is really messy. If you looked at the. Item on our agenda, you can see what was crossed out, but it was it's incredibly hard to enforce and it's incredibly out of date compared to what vehicles are out there. So, for example, it requires flotation devices for for recreational vehicles. You can't get flotation devices for recreational vehicles. So people make makeshift items. It's got weird weight requirements. It's very, very messy. So lakes and watershed commission did a lot of public engagement and spoke to different partners, including the sheriff's department, city of Madison and other entities throughout the county. and try to get their feedback as well as the public's feedback on trying to modify the ordinance for it to just make more sense and to be more practical. And so this is, it's a fairly big change because it's increasing the weight requirement or weight limit that is. But one of the big things that it is also doing though is requiring anybody that use a recreational vehicle to actually wear a light preserver. And so that would be pretty significant for them to be wearing a personal flotation device. While they're using the vehicles, to be clear, when I say recreational vehicle, I'm not talking about cars. I'm talking about stuff that the DNR would license. And so this is a really, it's a big cleanup, but it's a simplification that, as I said, worked with all the parties that are responsible for enforcement of this ordinance. So it was done with a lot of knowledge. The DNR was also involved in the discussions on this. I'm happy to try to answer questions. The Sheriff's Department might be able to try to answer questions from their perspective, and we can also discuss it. So I'll open the floor if anybody has any questions.

I have one.

Sure. Supervisor Larson, go ahead.

I'm sure this was vetted out in the public hearings, certainly with the Dane County Sheriff's Office. But just from my own understanding, if I'm not a recreational vehicle owner yet, are they all open air or they have cabins? And if a vehicle were to suddenly sink, would wearing a PFD create actually a hazard to folks that are trying to exit the vehicle but are like, you know, bonking around floating in the ceiling of their own vehicle?

Is there any safety concern that this imposes? I can just guess on some of those answers. I don't know if the sheriff or chief deputy in our guard might be able to give better answers on that. But, you know, I... My understanding from our discussions on vehicles is that the only vehicle that actually just sinks to the bottom are snowmobiles. All the other vehicles do actually float or that they won't sink. As far as people getting trapped in them, I don't think there was a concern as far as what I heard. I don't know if the sheriff's department, being the only real experts here, have anything that they can chime in on this. Doesn't look like it.

No problem. I'll save that. Okay.

I can get you contact information for people to talk to about that. And this obviously will come in front of the full board. But that is a very good question. Other questions? Thank you.

Not seeing any discussion.

I'll just throw in my two cents. I spent a long time on this on Lake and Watershed. I had very, very mixed feelings about making it easier for people to have recreational vehicles because of ice conditions. But through the engagement and through talking to the parties that are in charge of enforcing this, in charge of figuring it out, and looking at what other places in the state did, as well as the country, frankly, our stuff was just very impractical. And so I think, you know, if you talk to people who have recreational vehicles that use it on ice, they're pretty smart about their usage. I think wearing personal flotation devices really does help, you know, give some fail-safes. for the situation. But the other thing I would just add also is if somebody's vehicle does go under, they're in charge of the recovery, of paying for the recovery. So we don't, the county doesn't recover their vehicle for them. They have to pay for that recovery and work with the county on that.

I do have one question. How often does that happen? Do we have like data?

I don't have data on how often the vehicle's going, no.

Okay.

Sorry, that's a good question. Any other questions, discussions? Not seeing any unless I hear otherwise. I will assume approval by unanimous consent and we can move on to our next item. Our next item is 2026, Resolution 047. I don't see Supervisor Ritt here. I do see Emergency Management here. Do you have any background on this? Would you like to talk about this at all? Yeah, please come on up.

Yes, I have had communications with Supervisor Witt and helped her prepare the document. But majority of the work has been done by her at this particular time. And I will point out that it is a major concern what our mobile home units right here in Dane County, across the state of Wisconsin, in the event of severe weather, tornadoes, et cetera, of having a secure place to go at that particular time. She was going to continue, as I remember, looking at possible BRIC grants as well as other financial means throughout the state and throughout FEMA. And that was pretty much my conversation on it at the time. But I did support the idea of us looking at this very seriously.

I appreciate that. That's more than anybody else here knows. Thank you very much. Any questions on this item? Ashley, can I get a motion?

I have a question. Please. Supervisor Valjean, go ahead. Yep. Sorry. No. Yep. Do we have any kind of data on folks that have been injured or worse in mobile homes or manufactured homes in severe weathers?

That information, I believe, at this point was being requested. I have not seen it come past my desk, and I don't know for sure if Supervisor Ritt has received that information as well. We do realize the idea that, as it says right in here, there was 39 tornadoes across the state of Wisconsin in 2025, 15 during the month of May. But I don't have that information at this particular time.

Thanks. Any other questions or discussion on this item? I think the next item will possibly be helpful with you as well. Okay, unless I see otherwise. We need a motion. We need a motion, that's right. Still moved. Got a motion there. Unless I see otherwise, I'm gonna assume approval by unanimous consent, and we'll move on to our next item, which is 2026, Resolution 060, authorizing a contract between Dane County and the City of Madison for medication vending machine support. I believe we actually have somebody here to speak to this. If you'd like to introduce yourself and talk about this, that would be great.

Thank you. Carrie Meyer, Assistant Director with Emergency Management. This is a contract that we've had with the City of Madison for a handful of years now. It allows our EMS agencies to restock their medications right at the hospitals before they leave so that they can immediately return to service. So if they... just for example, take a patient to the hospital and have to do a nebulizer treatment, give albuterol, let's say, then they leave the hospital, they're able to go to this vending machine and vend that albuterol medication, restock that ambulance, and then be ready for another call for service. This is something Madison Fire has been doing for a lot of years, and I think it's three years now we've been partnering with them so that all of our EMS agencies can use those vending machines. We reimburse just at cost for those medications to the City of Madison, and we share the cost of their staff person that restocks those machines and does all of the ordering. So it's been a great partnership between our 20 EMS agencies and the City of Madison, and it allows our ambulances to stay in service and provide care quickly to everyone in the community.

Fantastic. I'll get a motion if there are questions. move thank you um any questions for staff on this item not seeing any any discussion Not seeing any. Assuming I don't hear otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent, and we will continue moving on with our agenda. Thank you so much, and sit tight. We'll hear from you probably more in a moment. Our next item is 2026 Resolution 066, which is authorizing a contract to provide a freeway service team for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. We have the Sheriff's Department here to talk about that. This is a continuation of a contract that exists. It's a renewal of it. Some people may know this as, you know, the individual who used to do this was Beltline Bob. But if we can get a motion, and then if somebody from the Sheriff's Department wants to talk about it, we can do that. Why don't we start with a motion?

Move to adopt the measure.

All right. Supervisor Larkson, thank you. Sheriff's Department, do you want to talk about this item?

Yeah, this is just allowing us the grant to continue the Beltline Bob going. I know there were some questions in regards to when it actually starts, the grant money kicks or when they actually the grant kicks in. I believe it's in the month of July, which starts tomorrow. But they actually took that into consideration and will cover and will cover the cost of that with the grant. So there will be no lapse in services for the Beltline Bob truck.

Thank you, Sheriff. Questions for the Sheriff's Department. Supervisor Belger, go ahead.

All right, thanks. Sheriff, is this always funded for a grant, all the years we've had it? Is it easy to just keep getting the same grant?

Yeah, the grant allows us to ease the burden on taxpayers, yes.

Oh, right, but we always get that grant to fund that.

That is correct.

Great, thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you both. Any other questions for the sheriff's department discussion? Not seeing any, unless I hear otherwise, I will assume approval by unanimous consent. And thank everybody. And we will move on to the presentation part of our agenda. We've got three on tap this evening. And our first presentation is from emergency management. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and introduce your team. And Stephanie, I assume, will pull up your slides momentarily.

Thank you. Again, Charles Tubbs, Director of Dane County Emergency Management. I want to start off with a statement here. I want to say good evening to all of you. We want to thank you. With a warm welcome to all of our new county board supervisors, as well as the veteran supervisors. And we look forward to serving and working with you now and in the future. We thank you and we appreciate the opportunity to present our Department of Emergency Management tonight and answer any questions that you may have. We are in full compliance with the guidelines of the County Executive and the Dane County Board of Supervisors for the 2027 budget process. We are also in full compliance with the plan of work from the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, that is administered by the State of Wisconsin as well. We have an outstanding staff who sincerely enjoys the opportunity of serving the people of Dane County. We provide dedicated support services for all our 60 jurisdictions throughout Dane County. We extend our commitment to the 13 counties in the Southwest region, as well as the entire state of Wisconsin. Tonight, our presenters will be Assistant Director Kerry Meyer, Communications and Outreach Manager Andrew Beckett, and myself. In our presentation, our department is dedicated, as you will see and hear, to protecting human life, property, and the environment with special emphasis on supporting the vulnerable citizens and communities of our county. We take pride in working with all people throughout the county and fostering strong partnerships. We look forward to the continuing strong partner and relationship we have with the county board. And we welcome any questions and feedback you have tonight. Thank you. At this time, I'm going to turn it over to a very fine team of players here and let them continue with our presentation.

Okay.

Do we know? Oh, here it is. Perfect timing. Awesome. Thank you so much, Stephanie. Thanks.

Thank you. Thanks again for this opportunity. I'm excited to meet many of the new supervisors on this committee as well. Again, my name is Carrie Meyer. I'm going to start out with next slide, please. Well, first, you can see our lovely team there. We do have 11 and a half staff and then One of our staff is a half-timer, and then Margo is one of our staff's service dogs. And so she's a great partner in our office as well. We love having her there. So come out anytime and meet her. We are out at Capek Road now. We've been there how long, Charles?

It's been three years, I think, in November. Yes.

And it's outstanding facility. And we don't really talk about that in our presentation, but we, until three years ago, we're in the Dane County jail building on the second floor. And we had to, store our equipment in many places other than with us and now we have a facility where we can have our equipment right there with us and we can host meetings and we have an eoc that's always functional and ready to go no matter when we need it so it's been a great change being out there and it's been great for all of our partners so just to start out our mission And emergency management is to support and strengthen our community to prepare for respond to recover from and reduce harm from emergencies and disasters. Our vision is to promote a safer and more resilient community. And we work on that in many, many angles with our staff. We have three divisions. So next slide. Our divisions are planning section who they work mainly on a lot of our plans, which makes sense. Talk about our threats and hazards, work with our partners, identify things that we can do to mitigate ahead of time and. work on what are our procedures and things after something might happen so andrew will talk more about that but that's our our one section of our department is planning our other division is the ems division that division was actually started out in 1977 when all of the ems services kind of began functioning throughout the county and it helped to collaborate with all of our municipalities to make sure that we were serving the community the best way we could and that has remained and it really has shown such a partnership with our hospitals and just health care in general. So we'll talk more on that as we move forward to and then our third division is the hazmat division. We work on off site response plans with our facilities within the county that have hazardous materials.

Next slide.

So this is our org chart. So again, we have 11 and a half positions, five and a half. So our halftime position is our critical incidents team, coordinator um so that's banan who's under um the p10 down there so we have sorry let me go with we have the um five full-time staff under emergency planning and then a half-time staff person hazardous materials we have two full-time and then under ems we have four full-time staff We do also have six LTEs that help with special projects. Some of those projects include grant writing to support our EMS, fire, and law enforcement communities. We try to help write for regional grants. And we also have LTEs that assist with safety training with our EMS services and others. So a very integral part as well are our LTE staff.

Next slide.

Some funding that I wanna just talk about, just in general, our GPR is just over 1.7 million. Our revenue is a little over 592,000. Most of that is from grants, which I'll talk about here in a second. And then our overall budget for 2026 is the 2.3. EMPG is a federal grant that in our average award is around $245,000. Those dollars go towards funding portions of our positions, in particular in the planning division. This program... has had some uncertainty just with funding through the federal government. And so far we were able, we got our funding for 2025 late in the year, but our, Right now, what we think we'll be getting is around that $245,000, but there is some uncertainty there. The EPCRA funding, Emergency Preparedness Community Right to Know, that's our HAZMAT funding. So that is funding that comes from the state, and that is to make sure that we have plans in place with those facilities within the county that have the highest hazards. Those plans include if something would happen at that facility, what does that area of threat look like to the community? How would we manage notifying the community and making sure that businesses have all of those things in place with their public safety partners to assure safety for the community? So that is $123,000. In 2026, just over $100,000 we received, and that goes towards funding that hazardous materials planner. Next slide another source of funding that we do have for 1 of our position is opiate settlement dollars and that's for opiate prevention specialist that position started in our office just over 2 years ago and the primary goal was that we were going to have that. person work with our public safety responders to better serve our opiate needs. And it's been outstanding. We have hope kits, which are kits that have Narcan and resources and fentanyl test strips, et cetera, in every ambulance in Dane County to be able to hand out to family members that are with a patient that's in crisis. It's been such a area of learning for our public safety providers. We started with our EMS providers and now Kaylee in this position has worked towards our law enforcement and helping better educate them about addiction and about just the challenges that people face in our community and how can we give them the resources that they need. So these resources are now in those hands. The other thing that Kaylee has worked on is our vending machines that are outside of our hospitals that have these free supplies in them as well. There's been challenges in the past with getting these sort of supplies in an emergency room because of the need for prescriptions in order to hand out anything in an ER, you need a prescription. Well, we want patients and family members to have access that is easy, easy access to be able to help their loved ones without worrying about cost, without worrying about, you know, insurance, if they have it, if they don't. So these vending machines are now placed just outside of UW Hospital and then just outside of St. Mary's on Park Street and Mill. And they're available to the community. Kaylee also stocks it with general supplies that people might need, whether it be socks, hygiene. But then there's the fentanyl test strips. There's the Narcan. It's been extremely successful. She is working on a couple of more vending machines based on our data of where overdoses are happening. And she's working closely now with the opiate settlement organization coordinator who's in the Office of Administration, DOA, to work on some of that. She works closely with public health. So that is a position in our office that works closely with public health and DOA to utilize those opiate settlement dollars to help the community. Homeland Security is another form of funding that comes in, and that's mainly to support exercises with our partners, mainly our public safety partners. And the same thing with our hazardous materials HMEP grant, which also supports exercises. So we're able to hire a contractor to facilitate an exercise with our partners in the community. This last one was, you know, what if we would have like a train facility

Derailment.

Thank you. Derailment. And how would we manage that? What would that look like? So those are the other grants that come in to our department. Now I'm going to pass it to Andrew for the next slide. Great.

Thank you, Carrie. So I'm going to talk a little bit about basically how emergency management operates here in the county in terms of how we fit into pretty much the entire system and working with our partners. So For just basic overview, emergency management basically operates on a cycle of moving from mitigation to preparedness to response to recovery. Everything we do during an emergency response basically feeds into that cycle. And different phases of that may be happening at the same time. While we're looking at the response, we're automatically looking towards recovery and mitigation against potential danger in the future. So really, everything we do kind of functions in kind of focusing on this cycle. Next slide, please. So one of the ways we do this is by having a kind of regional division of county sections and implementation of EM liaisons. We have four individuals in our office, myself and Carrie are among them, who work directly with the municipalities in four different quadrants of the county. And this is in order to do information sharing, hosting workshops, providing regular communication to them, but also identifying any needs they may have after an incident or with upcoming event support, offering them planning guidance if they need assistance with developing plans for either event plans or other activities, basically ensuring that they are plugged into the emergency management and planning side of things and working with them directly if they need assistance. In particular, after an incident occurs, especially natural disasters, we are in direct connection with them while they might be doing damage assessment and trying to evaluate their costs so that if they qualify for something like the Wisconsin Disaster Fund, which is a state program that provides funding reimbursement directly for public sector costs related to a disaster, we can make sure that they get that information through to the state so that they can apply. or in the rare event that there is any sort of federal support that might be coming in, getting that process initiated if there might need to be some sort of damage assessment process undertaken.

I'm just going to ask. add from historical perspective. This decision was made to break the county into quadrants after our 2018 flooding incident that happened. We recognize that with 60 municipalities, I mean, that's very unusual for a county to have that many points of contact to build those relationships before the disaster happens. was so key. And in 2018, there was a many small municipalities, especially on the Western side of the County that were very affected by that flood and really just did not have the connections with emergency management at that point. So we made the decision that, you know, let's break the County up. Let's, create those connections before something happens so that we have improved relationships with them. And I do think it's gone a long way in just having their awareness in emergency management, having them lean forward and be more prepared.

And we've had several effective workshops with them that have connected them to resources they may not have otherwise been aware of in order to assist with their own planning and response capabilities. Next slide, please. Thank you. Integrated preparedness planning. So basically, these are the different priorities we set as we work through basically looking at how our plans interact with what direction we're trying to move the county in preparedness wise. And really, these are kind of our priorities from 2026, which, you know, included. Continued municipal collaborations using our liaisons, providing support for municipal incident response and special events, conducting active shooter incident management trainings in those communities with their law enforcement first responders, EMS and fire. And then, of course, working to support schools for safety and reunification. Dane County Emergency Management is heavily involved with the county school safety group. which is basically a consortium of every school district in the county and public, both public and private, along with public safety professionals, holding regular workshops throughout the year, providing access to training and additional information, basically trying to serve as a resource so that they can help build their incident response plans and be better integrated into working with their community partners in the event they were to have an incident or a safety concern. Next slide, please. In addition to this, you know, we have a number of different policies and programs within our office. Just to highlight a few. First off, I need to mention our duty officer protocol. Dane County Emergency Management has members of staff who on a rotation serve in a 24-7, 365 capacity as a on-call individual ready to respond to any requests we may receive. through either public safety communications or directly with our public safety partners. These individuals, there's five members of our staff who serve on this rotation, seven days at a time, basically stand ready to respond at any time if there's a request for something like sending an emergency notification through the wireless emergency alert or the RAVE notification system, identifying resources that need to be deployed. We'll mention it later here, but deploying either CV1, any of our sandbagging machines, our UTV, any of the mass casualty trailers we have on site, helping to coordinate that response. In addition, the EMS countywide support system, this would be additional resources we will talk about more in depth as well, but basically things like the medication vending machines that Carrie mentioned earlier in the hearing here, but also the ambulances that the EMS the EMS office holds that are able to be deployed to assist with municipalities that need that support. Also the Southwest Incident Management Team. This is a team that is made up of representatives from throughout the Southwest quadrant of the state, basically the 13 counties that are included in the Southwest region, but members from a number of different emergency management departments, who serve in a on a special team that can be deployed to assist dane county or any other county that may request that assistance to serve with logistics planning operational support while they're working to support an emergency or disaster in addition we have a number of different resources but i will highlight the amateur radio emergency services that we work with through the Skywarn team. This is the network of amateur radio operators who often deploy throughout the county when we have a severe weather incident. They are radioing in information into our emergency operations center, but also sharing that information with the National Weather Service so that they can get ground truth on what's going on with the weather system rather than just having to rely on radar in order to make their alerts and warnings more effective and to identify where a storm may have had impacts. Next slide, please. In addition, we have a number of community liaisons we work with, not just at the municipal level. We work very closely with 911 in public safety in that area, law enforcement, fire, EMS. All of us have memberships and regularly attend meetings with those associations, interact with their members, share information and resources, and coordinate with them. We have regular check-ins and discussions with public health, safe communities, and the hospital system. both through the EMS Association, but also through different advisory groups, basically constant contact and communication with them. Just as a real-world example, right now we're in the middle of a period of extreme heat that's been moving through the county. We have had daily coordination calls with many of these partners in order to identify any unmet needs or ongoing concerns as we move through this pattern of weather and then work to help assist them with coordinating any possible shared efforts that might be taking place. Next slide, please. We also have many other vital partners in the emergency management cycle, public-private partnerships. This would be our work directly with organizations that could support a disaster with either resources or other supplies or other critical assistance. Working with our critical infrastructure partners, we had a call just a few weeks ago with our utility partners that service Dane County, the electric utilities, helping to facilitate that with 911. so that if we were to have a major incident that did impact electric use service, we have those direct points of contact lined up, ready to go, so that we can get information. During the most recent storm system that came through earlier on in this month, not Belleville last week or two weeks ago, but prior to that, and there was widespread power outages, we were in regular contact with MG&E in order to get updates and information on how they were progressing on outages. We also work with a number of different volunteer organizations, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, many others, our response agencies, other county departments and municipal leaders. We have close partnerships with many of the emergency response departments related in the county, but also just our human services, public health, you know, beyond the sheriff's office and others as we work to help them identify any needs, any planning needs and coordinate any activities or response that might need to be happen. As we mentioned through the liaison program, we're in regular contact with municipal leaders. We also work very closely with state and federal partners, the National Weather Service, a very key partner that we work with pretty regularly. We speak with them, we get daily updates from them whenever we have weather systems coming through. We work with them to host storm spotter training in the area once a year, a number of different things that we've done with them. We're in the process of actually having a member of their office start to come over to our office at least once a month to work out of our area, work directly with our staff, and then also use that as a jumping off point to reach out to other communities in the area. Also at the state level, Wisconsin Emergency Management is our direct partner and connection to the higher level, which would be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as other federal agencies, really, Department of Justice, FBI, really Secret Service, even when we've had dignitary visits in the area. We have a number of those partners at the federal level that we work with. And then, of course, the whole community. I mean, one of our focuses is obviously on outreach and making a better prepared population. And we do that really through trying to educate as much as possible and provide resources so that they can be safe. Next slide.

I'll move into resource support.

These are some of the deployable resources that we have within our office. First is CV1. This is the mobile command vehicle that is built out of our office and based there. It is a fully equipped LDV vehicle that is complete with office space. and has the ability for dispatch. It has wireless internet so that basically you can take a command post anywhere on the road, and it can be deployed anywhere 24-7, often used for emergency responses, but also available for event support. It has very robust communications capabilities in the fact that you could basically have a couple dispatchers out of the back running radio operations right on scene in the event of a large event where a large-scale law enforcement response or public safety response is needed. Next slide. In addition, we have two ambulances now in our office. First is Rescue 30, which is a bariatric-equipped ambulance, which is an ambulance that's designed to transport larger patients. It is one of the only few in this area of the country that So we're very excited and proud to have that. We also have Rescue 31, which was deployed into service earlier this year, which is just a basic ambulance. Both of these ambulances are available as a backup resource to our municipal EMS systems. Essentially, if they have a rig go down, they need backup coverage, it allows them to request this resource for use so that they do not have to rely on neighboring partners to fill the gap or they don't have to see a reduction in their service. Very critical resource and something that our partners are very grateful for access to. In addition to this, we also have a UTV, which can be deployed and utilized for special events, often parades, large-scale concerts, things like that, where public safety partners are working out in the field and may need that extra resource on site. Next slide. We also have drone support available for a number of different priorities, but our first and foremost would be damage assessment, but also search and rescue. Basically, they are equipped with infrared so that they can be effective in pretty much any conditions. We have three different sizes available. We also work closely with the state's air coordination group and the Wisconsin Drone Network. These are basically a resource that's available there so that we can get a bird's eye view on damage assessment afterwards. I believe they were utilized in Flone after Belleville just two weeks ago with the tornado that touched down there to help that community get a quick understanding of what kind of damage they were seeing in the aftermath of that storm event. Next slide. We also have some flood control assistance, many of these, I believe, were acquired after the floods we have for sandbagging machines that are deployed throughout the county. Three of them are held with municipalities, one of them is at our office in fitchburg these are able to very quickly fill sandbags and are available to communities to use, they need to just supply the sand. And to the extent what bags we don't have, we do have a cache of those. But during a large-scale response, we'd probably burn through those fairly quickly. There's also the access to pumps that have large-scale discharge hoses in order to pump out of areas. We also have what are called the WIP barriers, which are water-inflated property protectors. These are very long barriers that can be deployed quickly. in an area where we're worried about something like shoreline flooding with banks being encroached. I think the most recent deployment was in Marshall two years ago, which was due to a waterway that had risen very quickly. And they were worried about encroachment into the residential area. Those are also something they are stored with land and water, right? Or the parks department, which is who actually is trained to deploy them out into the field. And with that, I'm gonna hand it back to Carrie.

Next slide. So, I mean, we've talked about this to a point, but really every response begins at the local level and then expands as needed. So it depends on the situation. Belleville, just as a very recent example, there were needs that evening that were beyond what Belleville could support. So there was requests made to the county to support that we were able to then assist. And for Belleville, we did not need to make any requests to the level of the state, besides the National Weather Service coming out to obviously evaluate, but it goes from municipal to county to state to federal. And then obviously, it goes back down that same path. And the communities are left with that recovery piece at that municipal level. We're there to support. But, you know, depending on the size of the community, our role can vary. City of Madison has an emergency management coordinator. They can take more of that role on. But if you have a small community like a town of Berry that has a clerk that works, you know, half a day a week, it's a lot bigger lift. So those are the sort of things that we assist with based on what that municipality can handle. Next slide, please. Our emergency operations center is something that we will open depending on the level of an incident. Some of our municipalities will open their own locally. An emergency operations center is basically a resource for the field to support them. So you're in the field, again, Belleville for an example, in the moment they knew they needed more tarps to be able to make the homes safe for the evening. They knew they needed lighting to make it so their responders could do the search and rescue safely. Those are the sort of things that they only had so much. locally, so they made the request of the county, and then we worked with our resources to get that to them. The EOC, we've leaned forward by opening if we know severe weather's coming. Our EOC is often in a monitoring mode with our own staff, and then depending on the situation, we may have certain partners that join us. So for an example, with Abundant Life, in december of 2024 we had public health with us to help us with some of those resource requests that might be needed for mental health support and we had the red cross salvation army others that were helping that school community and the the city of madison community during that time. So it depends on the situation, how many people are in our EOC. If we have a large tornado, like the Stoughton tornado or the 2018 flooding, that the EOC is full with many of our county departments and many of our partners, including our hospitals, our schools, etc. So that EOC, we don't run a scene out in the community. So we're not incident command, we are supporting incident command from our office. Next slide, please. The APCRA, I spoke a little to this. We do have state dollars that come in for this, but basically any hazardous chemicals that are over 10,000 pounds, they have to report that. They have to have a plan. We have to assure that those plans are accurate and communicated to the partners. So if there's a facility within a community that, I'll just use like the tank farms, for example, out in McFarland, those large tanks that you can see from the Beltline. They have to have a plan, right? And they have to communicate that with those response partners in that area. And then those response partners also share those plans with their mutual aid so that they are prepared if something would happen on how they would respond. Next slide, please. Back to our EMS system. I want to just share some of our biggest wins with our EMS system. And for those, you know, the community itself, the county does not recognize the support that we do receive from our hospitals by doing this coordination. Patients in Dane County can go straight from an ambulance to a cath lab. They don't even have to stop in the emergency room because we've worked with our hospitals to identify that we in the field can take a picture of the heart and decide that someone is having a full STEMI, a cardiac a blockage that can go straight to a cath lab. They don't need to stop in the ER and take another picture. They can go straight to that cath lab. And we've built that trust with our hospitals by having this coordination. Same thing goes with our stroke. We can do stroke alerts and we can go straight from an ambulance to a CT scanner to see where that bleed is in the brain and not waste time in the emergency room. We also work closely with UW who have an ECMO system and we have had survivors from cardiac arrest who have been able to have compressions all the way from their home to a hospital and go straight to being in that cath lab and being put on a system that pumps their heart from the outside and survive a cardiac arrest because we have these relationships with our hospitals. So our EMS They use standard protocols. You don't see that across the country. Every agency has different sets of protocols. We are very consistent here in Dane County and it leads to better patient care. And between that and our 911 system, we work so closely with them as well. We are able to send the right resource to the right type of patient based on the symptoms that they are hearing through a caller. So if someone calls 911 and explains what they're experiencing, our 911 center can diagnose whether that's a low-level call or a very high acuity call and decide we can send just the ambulance locally to take care of this patient or we need to send a paramedic and a local ambulance or we need to send a helicopter, that sort of thing. our 911 center can figure those things out based on that protocol that they use when someone calls 911. So all those partnerships lead to improved patient care here in the county. And we really enjoy our once a year, we get to celebrate that at our survivor celebration. This year, we have just under 40 survivors of cardiac arrest. So their heart stopped at their home, their heart stopped at their home, you know, crazy legs run, their heart stopped at a restaurant, someone did CPR, EMS arrived, got their heart to start again. They survived and went home. We celebrate them at a Mallards game. That's coming up in July. Hopefully you all saw the invite. But it's really, it's just an example of how our system working together can truly save lives right here in this community. So if you can't tell, I'm very proud of our EMS system. Next slide, please.

Thanks. I'm going to talk a little bit about our outreach efforts. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, school safety has been a major focus of our office through basic different trainings on public safety with standard reunification methods, standard response protocol, also that ongoing active shooter incident management training and exercise. We also have, for the past... Two years and prior to that as well in other forms, but HOST helped coordinate protecting places of worship workshops here in Dane County so that faith communities can have access to resources and training and information that they may need in order to improve safety at their facilities, bringing in partners from both the state, federal, and local level to provide that information and workshop information. Uh, we also do a number of different community events throughout the year. I think I'm tracking over a dozen, uh, this year for different national night out and similar community events that we will be doing through the fall. Uh, we also partook in safety Saturday, which was earlier this month on the square, uh, with Madison fire and a number of other public safety partners, uh, with a demonstration of the mobile command vehicle down there on the square. So kids got a chance to check that out, but also talk about our different systems that we have out there. Um, You know, National Weather Service storm spotter training is a very important thing. We had two very packed rooms this year for trainings that somebody from the National Weather Service came over and helped teach the public how to become trained spotters. But we also do regular public education campaigns throughout the year. This would be through media releases and social media to basically help educate and inform the public about the steps they need to take in order to stay safe during critical times of the year. So flooding, severe weather, heat, national preparedness month in September, but also then as we move into the winter months as well. Next slide, please. Also, we're currently embarking on our natural hazard mitigation plan update. Well, I shouldn't say embarking. We've been underway for it for the past like eight months. This is a FEMA approved document that really encapsulates the description of natural hazards that affect Dane County, their effects on residents, and the strategies that can reduce the risk for these hazards. This plan is updated every five years. The plan currently expires in 2027. This is a plan that we work on with every municipality that chooses to participate. They're not required to participate, but in order to basically qualify for certain federal grant programs and state grant programs, they need to have an adopted natural hazard mitigation plan on the books. So the county has taken a wide all hazard approach, if possible, in order to get as many municipalities participating as we can. We currently have about 20 municipalities that are participating in this round with basically the only ones that can do the county as a pass-through are at the town level. But villages and cities, it is to their benefit to work with the county on this directly and have an adopted plan in place. uh we have had a number of workshops this spring uh with our participating municipalities they are currently working on updating their municipal annexes uh once the plan is complete the process moves on to essentially holding public hearings on it in order to get community feedback but then it does require adoption at the county board and the municipal level for any participating municipality so this is something we will be bringing back to you guys here as we progress uh through the for the through the coming year in order to get this plan adopted so uh Basically, it does require the state and FEMA to also sign off on it. There's a number of different moving parts, but we just wanted to provide a basic overview of what's going on with it. Next slide, please. The outdoor warning sirens. This is an area that Dane County Emergency Management oversees. There are 145 outdoor warning sirens in the county. They are a mix of municipal-owned and county-owned sirens, but they are all connected through the same system. This gives us a very consistent system. activation protocol for them so that municipalities do not have to worry about whether or not the button's been pushed it is a system that is based and triggered on the warning areas that are drawn by the national weather service we test the sirens first wednesday of the month at noon so be ready tomorrow They will hopefully be going off unless we have severe weather. But then they are activated for either tornado warnings or severe thunderstorm warnings with the destructive tag that have been issued by the National Weather Service. The destructive tag means that that storm has 80 mile an hour winds and or baseball sized hail associated with it. We saw that hail earlier this year. We've actually had multiple activations this spring and early summer for destructive tag under storms. The reason that that destructive tag is included in there is because the wireless emergency alert sent by the National Weather Service does go out for those storms. But they are capable of producing damage just as severe as a tornado, possibly over a wider span of area. So especially when you get those 80 mile an hour winds, we did. That storm system that came through in April caused a great deal of damage in different areas that was due just to straight line winds produced by those storms. These sirens are intended for people who are outdoors. So they are meant as an early notification for people to head to shelter and seek additional information. so you may often hear from people who say they don't hear a siren inside their house well there's probably a reason for that they may be indoors with the windows closed might be the middle of the night the air conditioning is going they might have the tv on those devices do not penetrate especially modern construction very well but they are intended and their purpose for where they are deployed across the community is typically in order to make sure that outdoor spaces are receiving that early warning as quickly as possible next slide please In addition, we oversee the emergency notification system for the County. Uh, this would be what's called I pause, which is the integrated public alert warning system. Uh, we do this through, uh, two primary ways. The first is the Dane County emergency notifications. This is an opt-in system. You may hear it referred to as reverse nine one one. Uh, that is a product that is, is somewhat similar. We use a system called rave, uh, which is a platform, um, also known as Smart 911, that essentially collects the information from landlines, but then people who don't have landlines, which is a growing amount of the population, have the ability to opt in their cell phone information. Rave will send notifications to those devices based on the registered address of that device or of that number. So if you have your cell phone registered to your home address, and there is an alert or warning that applies to that home address that we send through Rave, you will get the notification that way. This is for hazards. This is for information that we may need to get out, maybe public safety, general information. These are sent by Dane County Emergency Management. They go to cell phone and email, but again, this is an opt-in system. The next level of this is what's called wireless emergency alerts. We are one of three systems Four county in the state approved senders of wireless emergency alerts in the county, the others being Capitol Police, UW-Madison, and the state of Wisconsin through Wisconsin Emergency Management. These are the alerts that you get directly to your cell phone. National Weather Service sends them for things like severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, warnings that meet their criteria. We are more likely to send them for public safety issues, law enforcement incidents, active shooters, if there is some sort of critical incident where we need people to avoid an area or to evacuate an area. This would be the situations where we would typically send them. Our current protocol would be for the state's missing persons alerts, whether it be missing children all the way up to missing veterans or elderly or disabled individuals. Those go through the Department of Justice and the state's Traffic Management Center. But these are the ones that are based on proximity to cell phone towers. Essentially, we draw a shape or create a radius around a certain point, and any cell phone that's in that area that has wireless emergency alerts enabled should be going off. These are used only for critical public safety situations where life is potentially in danger if these don't go off. Next slide, please.

We're scooting back to me. PulsePoint. So if you haven't heard of PulsePoint, I hope that you will take a look at this app. PulsePoint is an app. It's across the country, but we have it here in Dane County, and it is supported by our hospitals, the city of Madison and Dane County. We all partner together with the dollars to support PulsePoint. What PulsePoint does is if 911 identifies that someone is having a cardiac event where they do not have a pulse, it will notify anyone that is within a quarter mile of that location if it's in a public place. So if we're sitting here and someone is at Melio's on the Martin Luther King there, and they would collapse and call 911, our phones would go off and say CPR is needed. It would also show me any AEDs between my location and Melio's. So I could grab an AED and I could go start compressions on someone until an ambulance gets there. Again, another way that we are improving our cardiac arrest survival here in Dane County. Between our 911 identifying that someone is in cardiac arrest, 911 telling the person on the other side of the phone how to do compressions, and then hopefully someone getting this alert and arriving to perform compressions, getting an AED quickly, and then the ambulance is getting there quickly. So just another something that we have here in Dane County to improve our outcomes and another partnership with our hospitals.

Next slide, please.

We just want to leave you with this. The only thing more difficult than preparing for disasters is explaining why you didn't. And I think that emergency management, our biggest role is getting people to the table to have these conversations ahead of time. Like anything, everyone is busy, in particular in public safety. The call volumes aren't... Coming down, they're busy responding. We're busy trying to staff our squad cars, our ambulances, our fire trucks. So it's really it's challenging to get people in the room to have these conversations and be prepared. But spending that time is, you know, the best thing that we can do. And it's much more difficult to explain why we didn't. So I think to Charles's point, we have an amazing team. that does a great job of building those relationships and getting our partners to the table so that we are more prepared as incidents happen. I'll let you next slide and close it out.

And in closing, we have two more hours if you're late. No, go ahead.

The chair says no.

In closing, I do want to say our doors are always open. You're always welcome. You don't have to ask for an invitation. And I know you spoke, Chair, in reference to possibly having meetings there. We will open the doors and welcome meetings. Very friendly bunch, very good bunch. And as you heard throughout this presentation, our commitment is the value of human life here in Dane County.

Thank you so much for being here this evening. That was incredibly helpful. We have time for some questions. Supervisor Veldren, go ahead.

Thanks, Chair. Thanks for the presentation, Tubbs and staff. The new building, are people there just regular 9 to 5 unless there is an emergency?

We're there as early sometimes as 6 a.m. late to the evenings. We have a number of meetings that go on in the evening. But as I believe Kerry and Andrew both mentioned, in the event we have knowledge that we have potential dangerous weather or potential dangerous situation arise, we do partially open the EOC and we remain until that situation is cleared. So we can be there for numerous hours or even around the clock. Right. We went into planning for 12-hour shifts five days a week. 2018, I think we're open 24 hours a day for about three straight weeks.

Yeah, just because, you know, that's part of my old district. I drive by it. It just seems like when there's not, you know, folks there. But obviously, when it gears up, it gears up. And that's why I'm just trying to – I guess I think of it as a 911, but you're really not. Um, those, uh, those one presentations was that conducted there that, that, uh, one was a slide that Carrie showed. Um, it was a big, it was a large group. Was that done, um, at the, uh, at the, at center at our center.

At the emergency operations center. That's great.

Yeah. There was some big group you were showing your presentation or, um, or maybe that was during or right after I was kind of, uh, uh, debriefing. of the situation.

So the picture that we used on that slide was actually from one of our storm spotter trainings that we hosted at our office earlier this year. That would have been the storm spotter training. And I believe he did those in late April, uh, was national weather service sends a meteorologist over. And then we made the space available for that public gathering. Uh, it was quite full. Uh, we, we are back. We're, we're slowly climbing back to, uh, pre pandemic numbers on storm spotter training. So we will be looking for some larger venues next year.

And then one more, uh, question on operations or with policy. So are there municipalities that don't participate in certain activities then? And how do we treat those? Obviously, if there's an emergency that we're going, then we're going to, with everything that the county need, they need, but how does that affect our, I guess, our relationship? I would say the majority. A dollar amount on it, but there has to be some, if they're contributing as opposed to not contributing.

I would say the majority of the jurisdictions do participate, if not all. And I can honestly say at the time of crisis, it does not enough fear with our relationships. We do what we need to do. They are very supportive and things work extremely well moving forward.

I would just add that we've given the opportunities to do evening trainings as well for some of those smaller municipalities where it might be their chairperson and a clerk that works a half a day a week. So we do those opportunities as well. We try to record those trainings as well to be able to share with them so they can view them on their own time. And this goes for all of the supervisors as well. If you have an opportunity for us to do some education with your constituents or any boards out there, we're happy to do that. So we do have to flex, I will say, the hour sometimes to meet the needs of some of those smaller municipalities that you speak of.

And we do go to their locations. They don't always have to come to us. We will go throughout the county and provide the same service.

Just one last thing without taking everybody's time. Are you concerned about that grant or not? Because it just, I know you said, it just came to the state, so the federal grant that the state just received, so is that a concern just when budget's coming around? So is that something we need to really seriously look at? Obviously, yes, but

We are extremely concerned about where that is at this particular time and we monitor it closely. We work very close with the county executive's office to keep them informed. And Carlos, a Corp Council, to keep them very informed where we are because we do rely on those dollars to help supplement our budget. It plays a major role in moving forward.

Thanks. Thank you, Supervisor Veldren. Our next questions will be coming from Supervisor Lewis.

Go ahead. So thank you for that presentation. It's amazing, all the things that you're doing and all the partnerships you've built. So with the team that you have, so how much experience, like how many years and all of, you know, to be able to do all of those things, to have all of that knowledge?

Well, again, we have, Carrie, I believe, just completed 21 years.

I look like I'm 21. How does that happen?

Andrew came over from the state, and he has a total now of what, between the state and us? Eight years in emergency management. I have roughly 54 years of law enforcement corrections, emergency management, and homeland security combined. We have... some newer employees but they come in well trained well advanced some is uh already uh paramedics trained uh some have been previous emergency manager directors in other counties so we really have a diverse group of people and we don't shy back on training and providing services to our newer staff so yeah we do have a pretty good overall amount of experience in the office

And one of our staff members just became certified bilingual. So he has been doing a lot of outreach with our Latino community, which has been just outstanding. We've done some of that outreach, but to have him be able to speak fluently It has been just great in these meetings and just building up that trust. And Xander comes from, he was emergency management in another state. So again, a lot of perspective from disasters that we haven't experienced here. And he's learning about a lot about Wisconsin disasters versus California type disasters. But that has been a great addition to the office as well.

So what would you say is your biggest challenge, just in general? I know you had mentioned getting everyone to participate or getting out to them. Would that be, is there anything else that, you know?

One of our biggest challenges, too, is dealing with the unexpected severe weather we're dealing now in the country, around the world. As you see it, it's unpredictable. For instance, two weeks ago, last week in Belleville, the tornado arose out of nowhere. Basically, it was not under radar. The winds changed, the heat conditions, whatever we had in the tornado hit, there was no pre-warning. By the time, as I recall, the sirens went off, the tornado was active at that particular time. So that's a real major concern. The active shooter... assailant that we are noticing around the country, right here in Dane County as well as the state of Wisconsin is another major concern of planning and preparing for those types of situations. The pandemic, you know, that we experience, you know, tremendous cooperation and teamwork throughout the county that put us in a situation where we were able to survive that without losing a lot of lives. So there's a lot of preparation and planning that goes on. And the critical threats that you see around the country, we face them right in the county.

Thank you. Supervisor Larson, go ahead.

Thanks to all three of you for an outstanding presentation that was very informative, very compact with a lot of meaty details. I really appreciate what you do. Having worked on my end in the military with responding to natural disasters and other disaster relief efforts, I understand the municipal request to county, request to state up to the federal level. And how that comes down, at least, you know, request wise. I was just curious if you've had any examples of or known examples. I don't need a research project or anything of the military or the Coast Guard or the National Guard or Air National Guard participating in any of your efforts.

Absolutely. They played a major part in COVID-19. They helped with the testing and vaccines, et cetera. We're doing our episode at the Alliance Center. They sit in some of our meetings. We work very closely with the 154th. We're in direct contact, and they provide a service, and they're willing to help at any time. We appreciate them very much. Thank you for your service, too, ma'am.

Yes, thank you. I would add, too, our partners with CESA. Tell me what that stands for again, Charles. Critical Infrastructure. Thank you. Their support to our school community and our business community here in Dane County has been outstanding. They do threat assessments for our schools. They give guidance as far as... ideas and thoughts on better safety within those businesses and schools. So those partnerships that we have with our federal partners right here, DHS, the Office of School Safety, Department of Justice, those partnerships as well have really grown over the last few years. And again, I think it's the relationship building.

The nice thing about it, too, they usually never charge. Absolutely. A lot of free training, and we push it out to our staff, the entire county. There's a lot of training they don't charge for.

Any other questions, Supervisor Larson?

Sorry, I muted myself. I was shuffling paper around. None for me. Thank you very much. Supervisor Velger, for the second time, I'll just tell you, we have two other presentations.

No, I just wanted to add, this is kind of an anecdote. When Supervisor Larson was talking about the military, I recall, and Charles, I'm trying to remember, Director, if you were at the county, when that large snowstorm hit, Back in, I can't remember the year. 2008. That really changed the department, didn't it? Because people weren't being able to get around. There were ATVs and there was a lack of really coordination with that because it really got messy on them. It was on 51 or it was on the interstate. Yeah, I remember that.

Yeah, they were very effective, very helpful. And I've been blessed to be a honorary commander with the 154 Fighter Wing. And I've learned a lot from them as well and include them in a lot of planning.

Thank you, supervisors. Thank you. Anything else? Thank you again for coming and thank you for all you do. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. We're warmed up for you guys. All right, we're gonna move on to our second presentation of the evening from the Office of Justice Reform.

Thank you.

I'll sit over here. Good evening. Thank you all. I'm Colleen Clark Bernhardt. I'm the director of the Dane County Office of Justice Reform. Good evening and thank you all for your service as public servants and members of PPNJ. I also throw a note of gratitude to my colleagues in Corp Council for running the meeting so well and making it easy for presenters because I've been on the other side. So if we can pull up my PowerPoint, I can get started.

So this is us, the Dane County Office of Justice Reform.

We are the newest department in Dane County, but it came after a long long effort at planning, communication, and collaboration among justice stakeholders. So what I'm gonna go over, next slide please, Stephanie. What I'll go over today or this evening rather is our vision and mission, the staffing structure, the funding in terms of staffing, and then I can give you some overload overall on the workload that we have. Next slide, please. So our visions are really start with system collaboration. And so one of the things early on I talked about is justice systems often appear as windowless huts. Previous Sheriff Mahoney would say it's like you're in a mall, a food court, everybody's doing different things, not necessarily communicating. So part of the work and the effort within the Office of Justice Reform is really that system collaboration. Working with all our partners across the justice spectrum within Dane County, Health and community organizations. Um, we are a catalyst for innovation. Um, our office has, um, been a continual. Um, partner in some national research and national technical assistance. In fact, when we first were, um. Instituted we had 70 members of the community working on collaboratively on the intersection of behavioral health and criminal justice. That intersection is often a very dangerous intersection for everyone program design and development. Advancing initiatives grounded in data and guided by community voice with a focus on equity and fairness and data-driven decisions, which I'll talk about a little bit more. Next slide, please. Our mission is to marshal and coordinate resources within and beyond the county's criminal justice system to improve public safety, advance data-driven justice and reduce disparities. These efforts depend on strong partnerships with essential stakeholders, including agency directors, local elected officials, researchers and individuals with firsthand experience of the impacts of the criminal justice system.

Next slide, please, Stephanie.

So we're a small, but I would say powerful team. Myself as the director, we have a research analyst, community court coordinator, data and evaluation coordinator, a clerk, and yet to be hired, but hopefully very soon, a community court case manager position that is a project position through some funding I got from Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice on the federal level. Next slide. So here's our personnel cost. So you can see the bulk of it is GPR with that about 11% for the community court case manager from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Our personnel makes up by far the majority of our costs, our overall budgets about 1.1 plus, but by far it's personnel. And I'm very, very proud of the team that we've put together and I'll speak more of them as we go through workforce. Next slide, please. So what you see before you is really the ecosystem, as I call it, of justice improvement. So it's got a lot of different veins to it. There's community engagement. There's policy research and data-driven decisions. There's grants and investments. There's the diversion programs. And kind of centering this is what's called the Community Justice Council. So the Community Justice Council is a council made up of 17 members, including the chair of PPNJ, the chair of HHN, Madison's police chief, other advisory members, but there's also the county board chair, the district attorney, the sheriff, the county executive, clerk of courts, the list goes on, all collaborating to break down those windowless silos and to be able to communicate about justice reform in a more collaborative space. Next slide, please. So when I talk about the CJC, I must say recent news was I opened up a email from NACO, which is the National Associations of County, and on this thought piece was Dane County CJC is highlighted. So it came to a surprise to me that they were putting us in a publication, but it really speaks to the long-term, hard-earned effort of all those justice leaders within the CJC. So at the top of the CJC, you have that CJC executive body. We also have three subcommittees. Our longest is Pretrial Improvement. Judge McNamara is the chair of that. We have the CJC Racial Disparities Subcommittee, and we also have CJC Behavioral Health, looking at that intersectionality. Occasionally, we have had one subcommittee temporary subcommittee for the Community Court Advisory Planning Committee. Those are rare, but we also do work groups and do community groups to help inform better practices. Next slide, please. most recently we've gone through a strategic plan so when i gave the shout out to the cjc what nako was saying i should also say we are one of the best practice sites in the nation for uh it's the national association of criminal justice coordinating councils we are a community justice council but Needless to say, it's something that the county should be really proud of. We have recently undergone a new strategic plan with over, you know, well over 100 different voices at the table. The strategic plan is available on our website. You know, I've got a couple of copies if anybody wants one and brought one with me today. But what the CJC strategic plan will really do is help us with objectives and tactics for the next three years, and frankly, longer than the next three years. Next slide, please. So here's a highlight on one of those subcommittees. The pretrial subcommittee, you can pop on the QR code if you're interested in more information, but it'll give you some of the history, some of the major initiatives that that subcommittee worked on, which included... The only randomized control test that I know of that Dane County has taken place in with Harvard's Access to Justice Lab, which they'll give their final presentation to the CJC later in July around our pretrial process. That speaks to the, that continuum of working with all our justice stakeholders, national researcher, and then accurate data in. In our county next slide please. is our Racial Disparities Subcommittee. So you will, if you haven't heard already about a couple of initiatives that came out of the Racial Disparities Subcommittee. One was the Community Restorative Court. So the Community Restorative Court is under Department of Human Services, but it was built and structured out of this subcommittee. It's a non-traditional approach for folks facing a misdemeanor who are 17 to 25 years old. So it's outside of the criminal justice system. And there are peacemaking circles that then include the victim or victim representation, the respondent, which is what we call the defendant in this case, and trained facilitators. There's over 300 community members that have been trained in restorative justice that want to be a part of that change. So that is something that we just celebrated our 10th anniversary of that model program that is lifted oftentimes across the country.

Next slide, please.

And then the Behavioral Health Subcommittee. Right on all of these, you can see the membership and some of their big initiatives. But one thing we've worked on is the Familiar Faces Initiative within behavioral health. So those folks that are familiar to the jail, to law enforcement, sometimes to Department of Human Services around behavioral health concerns, we developed things like a booking alert to say, okay, one of the familiar faces that we have in Dane County has been booked into the Dane County Jail. That's sent to the Department of Human Services, and then the social workers can take it from there. So This committee right now is chaired by Judge Ann Peacock, and they're doing a lot of work in work groups, looking at those objectives and tactics from the strategic plan. So that becomes really the Bible of the work for all the subcommittees, and then the subcommittees report up to the executive committee. Next slide, please. So who are some of our national and local research partners? As I alluded to, Harvard Law School Access to Justice Lab is one of our big partners, has been. Policy Research Associates, the Center for Justice Innovation, the Council for State Governments, UW Law School Restorative Justice Project, UW Law. excuse me, UW Social Work, Housing Solutions Lab, NACO, and the list goes on and on. Dane County is known nationwide as a county looking at justice reform with committed and curious stakeholders and very accurate data, plus community members that want to see a difference.

Next slide, please.

And what's the key to this from my position and being in the county doing this work for the last 17 years? Since 2016, we're one of three counties counties in the state of Wisconsin and few nationally that have a data sharing MOU with some of those key data owners in our justice system. They include the Dane County Sheriff, the District Attorney, Clerk of Courts, Pretrial Services, and more. Without that accurate data, it's really challenging to connect the dots to make systems change. And so without those key constitutional and data owners, our work locally, our work getting national grants and national technical assistance is lessened. This is really one of the keys to the success of the CJC and justice reform in Dane County.

Next slide, please.

So what are our current projects? As I said, we'll hear later this in July, one of our biggest research projects, but right now we're working with an organization called Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research. I won't read it all loud to you, but we were one of the few counties who earned the right to be in this learning cohort. And two areas are our main focus. Reducing failure to appear rates, which means you might get a arrest warrant, which means you might be taken to jail. So you're taking a bed, you're taking court time, et cetera. So we want to make sure people know and can get to court as frequently as possible and strengthening that diversion continuum. The work of APPR, as they're called, is also connected to Notre Dame and potential future research partnerships through one of the only philanthropists in the area of justice improvement right now, independent of the federal government, which is Arnold Ventures, which is who I got the funding for the pretrial research project years ago. So that's exciting and that's happening right now. Next slide, please. Another thing that's happening right now is public safety and communications, along with Madison Fire, along with Department of Human Services, really came to the Harvard Kennedy School, GPL, they call them, to look at the CARES program, right? So then when they're looking at data and trying to connect the dots, then they came to OJR. the Office of Justice Reform to help facilitate that. So that'll be us working in concert with Madison Fire and Dane County Sheriff's Office and Harvard Government Performance Lab to look at the CARES, tell the full story of CARES, which is obviously the mobile crisis in Dane County or in the City of Madison and Sun Prairie.

Next slide, please.

The other thing that we're really excited about is launching, as I alluded to, we have a $600,000 federal grant. We have a full-time community court coordinator. Plus, I'm hopeful in the next month we can hire the community court case manager, the Dane County Community Court. You will see a picture on your slide. This is Judge Trammell's courtroom. It looks very different from the courtrooms that we have in Dane County Circuit Court, and it feels very different than those courtrooms. Judge Trammell has done an incredible job transforming that space, making it ready for participants in the program. The program is designed for nonviolent folks who are facing a charge. So the district attorney is charging. They're facing the charge. They're 17 to 35 year old. It's a nonviolent charge. And the community court, what we're trying to do is really address the root causes. So if it's a trespass, there may be things underlying that that trespass isn't speaking to. There might be issues of homelessness or housing vulnerability. There might be lack of employment. Those are areas that we really can address through the Dane County Community Court. And so You'll see the link later. But we're really excited because this is an attempt to expand that diversion continuum from what we already have to folks with a deeper criminal history than that are matched by some of the diversion programs right now.

And next slide, please.

The services that may assist depending on the assessment include peer support, restitution, community service or community enhancement hours, connections to CCS, restorative justice processes, so a link to that CRC that I talked to and those well-trained peacemakers, education, accountability classes, substance use, and and other things including document assistance with state id and and and things of that note um the referral uh process oh i'm sorry uh next slide thank you um eligibility is defined and determined by the district attorney's office so they are looking at who's coming in 17 to 35, nonviolent, and then sorting according to their process. The victim is notified and has conferred with them. There's an initial court event where the potential participant hears about the community court. from Judge Trammell and both, usually, Court Commissioner Signe Bainai. There's an assessment done by community court staff, and then there's a plan that then becomes codified via the courts, and then off we go. So that's still in process, but I'm very hopeful, and it's been a long-term effort Dane County initiative and hope and we're really getting very close and and so with that, I think I meant my last slide. Our different websites are the Office of Justice Reform is under county departments, depending on how you like to search for things, but it's justicereform.danecounty.gov. And the CJC people who have been around me a long time when they want to know, well, what's the data and who's in the jail today in aggregate is cjc.countyofdane or danecounty.gov.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Are there questions?

Do you have any questions? Yes. Yes, I do. I always ask this question. So you're doing terrific work. Thank you so much for the presentation. So the people on your staff, how long have they been with the county, with your department? I'm assuming they have a lot of experience.

They do. So I feel really... I feel gratitude for the level of folks on staff. So I'm hopeful at some point, if you wanna hear more about the Office of Justice Reform, I can invite some of them. But Tamarine Cornelius has been doing the work of the data dashboards and data calling with me for the last four and a half years. So she's the longest one with this new department. So the department itself, started two years ago. The work that kind of helped launch it, I would say, was 15 years of building up to a space where we needed a dedicated department to it. So Tamarine's been there four and a half years. JL Curry's been there now. She's the community court coordinator, about 16 months, so new, but has a depth of experience in case management. Sharon Bowie is the data and evaluation coordinator. He has a depth of experience in data, as well as, you know, over 25 years work with folks coming in and out of prison and jails and looking at core causes and data around that. Delia Young is our administrative glue. And I'm missing the new community court case manager. And then we always... get asked and are happy to host interns. So usually we have a master level social work intern in office 20 hours a week for the academic year. And this year we also hosted a second year law student. So The work of running the CJC and all the subcommittees, that's a really heavy both administrative load, but then we do the research and the data work behind it and then pull in the local and national partners. So while I say we're one of the smallest team, I think we're really one of the most productive too, but I'm very biased. I will acknowledge, I think you're going to hear from every department head that their team's the best.

So restorative justice program is in the community court. So what is the differences between them? I think you had said that with the community court, they just have more involvement with the criminal justice system. The people would be referred to that as opposed to restorative justice, maybe not so much.

Yeah, so the Community Restorative Court, so I helped build that. That's called the CRC. So municipal law enforcement can refer in. The district attorney can also. The district attorney, if he's referring in, is saying it's pre-charged. I'm not charging this in criminal court. Community court, he's saying I'm charging this in circuit court. You are going to circuit court. It's a traditional response, a traditional court in a way, in the trajectory, with non-traditional responses as far as addressing root causes and using restorative justice. The CRC is pre-charged. with the hopes of getting things early so folks don't have that more serious involvement when they get to the community court so we named the crc before we developed the community court it probably shouldn't be called court because it's it's outside of the court okay thank you i guess supervisor supervisor veldrin

Thank you. Thanks, Colleen. Really great presentation as someone who's known this whole thing since it started back with the groups in whatever summer that was prior to the jail even being just being mentioned, but trying to get our hands and heads around the whole system. Where are you in terms of getting the whole thing where you envisioned it?

You mean the whole department?

Yeah. I mean, well, do you need the case manager? I mean, is it the one judge? That's set up, but it's not in use yet, that one courtroom.

It is in use. So community court is on Tuesday mornings. However, the process of getting a... they would be a defendant to a participant, right? There's an intake process. There's the description of the community court. It is a volunteer program. So the defendant has to say, yes, this works for me. So that takes some time. So we haven't, we don't have, we've had five or six referrals. We don't yet have that process. first person that's diving in but there certainly has been work around it and um like i said you know uh the the courtroom the way judge trammell has has said it sets the tone it speaks volumes for um what where our hopes are absolutely so what i know because you're collecting so much data um have you been able to say we've gotten this man

many folks yet like diverted from jail in the office, you know, and I know there was issues always with the DA about making sure he was referring people into the program as well. So hopefully that's moving in a better direction now.

Yeah, I think in general, even when we built the community restorative court that I said has had this 10th year anniversary, that systems change or new program takes some time right so when we first hired our first crc coordinator i can remember having conversations with electeds about there's only two participants and we're paying for this right that program has grown into a super successful program I'm confident that the community court will also grow into a super successful program, but there will always be hiccups in the program development and design from where, you know, one person thinks, two people think, to the collective, okay, this is what we can move forward.

Sure. Okay. I get it. Thanks.

Supervisor, any other questions?

Sounds for me, but thank you so much.

You're welcome. Thank you so much for being with us. Could I have that? Yes, you may. I would very much like that.

And if you'd like data, our dashboards are recognized nationally, cjc.danecounty.gov. Look at data.

Very fun to play with. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming this evening. Thanks for all you do.

Thank you.

All right, move on to our last presentation, and certainly not least, presentation of the evening, Free Child Services.

Thank you so much, Supervisors, Chair, for having me and giving me the opportunity to discuss my very small, very niche department. For that reason, I have very few fun graphics. I apologize in advance. But I... think that I have a lot of data and information, thanks largely to a shout out to Colleen. I get a lot of this information from the CJC information as well as like our own databases. So my name is Shannon Pierce. I'm the director of Dane County Pretrial Services. So I'm just gonna go through kind of our history and everything that we do. So in looking at this, we would have started, I guess if you hear any of the acronyms that kind of float around, people may say PTS or DCPS, AATIP, bail monitoring, all the same program, that's us. We are currently Dane County Pretrial Services, but we would have started as the Alternatives to Incarceration Program or AATIP. We were created with jail diversion coordinator position under the clerk of courts. And then there was also an electronic monitoring program kind of in that that also functioned with staff social workers. And then a few years later, they would have created specifically the bail monitoring program meant for pretrial services. And then from there in 2012, the post-conviction monitoring element would have been ended within kind of the AATIP umbrella, and it would have been assumed by the sheriff's office. And so that's the Custody Alternative Monitoring Program, CAMP, or diversion, if you hear that from other individuals. When people talk about electronic monitoring in the county, it's important to know that we would be, again, that pretrial, pre-conviction. Everyone who's on our program is innocent. They have not been convicted of anything. Anyone who is in that camp, they are doing a jail diversion program post-conviction. So in 2015, we would have, as the county partnered with Arnold Ventures, as described by Colleen, to implement the use of the Public Safety Assessment, or the PSA. It's a standardized pretrial risk tool. It's race and gender neutral. And in looking at that information, that's kind of when that partnership would have started in some of the research. And at that point, we've been using that PSA now for over 10 years. Um, in 2019 is when we finally moved from a tip and became pretrial services. Uh, we were still a program under the clerk of courts. We would have moved though from the city county building to the courthouse. And then most recently 2022 is when we finally became our own department in that we are no longer on under the clerk of courts. So I would have started as the department head in the beginning of 2024. So I've been doing this for the last two and a half years. Next slide, please. Thank you. So our staff, again, small, niche department. It's myself. I have five case managers to include one lead case manager. I have two pretrial services assessors. They are the individuals who do the public safety assessment, the PSA, and then I have one clerk. Most of my case managers are licensed social workers, but they are reclassified intentionally to case managers so that future positions don't necessarily need to be filled by social workers. The intent was so that we could try and raise some of the diversity within our office. And the goal is to, again, increase that diversity amongst the staff, ideally try and get some bilingual positions in there because we interact with so many individuals. who speak other languages and have different backgrounds. Next slide, please. So just briefly overviewing our budget, we have nine employees. Like I said, our entire budget is all covered by GPR. We have no revenue sources or funding of any kind within our department. We have just under $1.4 million. I kind of broke down the areas specifically related to electronic monitoring, drug testing, and peer support because they would have been the areas where we kind of cut last year. So at this point, these are kind of the numbers that we're using for those support services and monitoring services within our budget. And then just to speak, I know I'll talk about this in the future, but this is kind of our goal is a little over $32,000 that we'll have to reduce for the upcoming budget cycle. um i think that from there where we made some of the cuts um would have been a lot of it was related to electronic monitoring i'm going to talk about electronic monitoring a lot because i know that everyone received a letter from the judges um talking about some of the challenges with electronic monitoring so i want to give as much background as possible about that um In the past, historically, our budget had always been approximately $105,000 until about 2025, we raised it to about $205,000. But it's an area we have always overspent. So last year, when you look at our total usage, our actual usage, it was closer to $315,000. Largely, that is because we have no... We have no discretion about who's referred for electronic monitoring ultimately. We don't have a process to To decide who's going to be placed on that that's entirely up to the commissioners and the judges so based on prior practice we have always overspent and everyone has kind of understood we were going to overspend in that particular category and then in looking at that that we wanted to make the reductions where it made the most sense, and we were looking at renegotiating the contract pricing. So last year, I did renegotiate our pricing for both our program and the sheriff's office so that us and diversion pay slightly lower rates now because we all kind of consolidated under that. So just for your reference, it costs about $3.50 for remote alcohol monitoring. That's where the individuals kind of blow into a remote PBT, and they do that about three to four times a day. It costs $6.50 per day for what's called a continuous alcohol monitoring bracelet, or a CAM, that is similar to a GPS bracelet. It's a bracelet worn around your ankle. It will monitor the levels of alcohol, essentially, in your sweat. So that's another option that we've had. And it costs about $275 to use GPS monitoring. Where we have a lot of... money that we spend is unfortunately in lost equipment. The nature of our program is such that we do not charge for anything. We simply tell the individuals that they will be charged and it will be sent to collections if they lose any equipment. But that's not necessarily an amount of money that we recoup for our program. It's an important tenant, I think, to pre-trial services that we don't charge for those things because they are innocent and Of course, they are referred to this program. So it's an area of debate that's come up before, but I can at least explain that that's historically why we've never charged for anything. But our lost equipment costs each year have been substantial. In 2024, we spent about $55,000, and in 2025, we spent about $60,000 just on lost equipment specifically. So from there, I'll touch more on electronic monitoring, but for, next slide please, just the role of pretrial generally in the system. Our mission is very specific because essentially court appearance and public safety are the only constitutionally permissible reasons for limiting pretrial liberty. So that's why we have always used court appearance and criminal arrests as the measures for risk and success. So our mission is to help people successfully complete pretrial supervision and improve community safety by increasing court appearance and reducing new arrests. For Dane County, most individuals on pretrial or in a pretrial status are not going to be on pretrial supervision. So it can be very confusing just because there's the pretrial subcommittee for CJC, but that's not just pretrial services and pretrial status. So all of those things, again, those individuals are just, you know, not convicted. But for statistics, if you look at approximately 4,400 people in the system are in some sort of pretrial status. Historically, my program supervises about 4% to 5% of those individuals. And then if you look at all of those individuals, about 91% of them are released and in the community, and then 9% remain incarcerated. So in looking at that, what we are trying to do is act as kind of an alternative to incarceration for the individuals who need either additional support for public safety reasons or we are looking at that support so that they can be in the community in lieu of incarceration. Knowing that, I often look at the jail population. Again, thank you to Colleen and her team for these stats. But in looking at the jail snapshot for today, for example, of the 767 inmates I know that changes minute to minute. But of those, approximately 45% of them are in some sort of pretrial status. And of that 45%, 53% had no other holds, meaning that approximately 24% of the jail population is incarcerated due to pretrial detention alone. So either they are being held due to cash bail or it's prior to their initial appearance. So that is kind of the specific population that my team can hope to impact when it comes to the jail population. Right now, our numbers are pretty low, all things considered. That is because of the budgetary restrictions. Historically, we have supervised about 200 to 220 people at one time. We are down to about 105. Largely, again, that's because we are limited in the use of our electronic monitoring. I anticipate that some of those numbers will change next year once we are able to kind of figure out the budget moving forward. realistically going to be a tough transition year because we had that fund where we historically overspent and we didn't have any wait lists and we kind of just were willing and able to supervise anyone who was referred and now that we have a wait list we have to you know take our numbers back down and then move back into a more sustainable level with our next budget cycle. Next slide, please. A very, very watered down map of the system to show kind of where we're at. But essentially, those boxes in red are where my staff would be involved. So after an arrest and an individual is taken into custody, we complete the public safety assessment. My two assessors will only meet with individuals who are incarcerated to complete those assessments. And then those recommendations from the public safety assessment, they will essentially say whether an individual should get cash bail or a signature bond, and then whether or not they should have any sort of conditions. So those recommendations are made on a tool that is then assessed by the commissioners at the initial appearance. It is only a tool. They are not required to follow the recommendations on the PSA. I bring this up largely because while constitutionally you have always looked at making sure they go to court and for public safety, we do have Act III in Wisconsin, because of that commissioners are able to take into consideration the severity of the offense and whether there's a risk of severe harm to any of the individuals in the community and they can make those decisions including that information so those things can also be flagged for the commissioners and so maybe even if our assessment tool says that they shouldn't have any cash bail or any conditions, they may decide that based on kind of those Act III considerations that they will still put them in our program or give them cash bail. If they give them, it doesn't really matter what type of bail they get, a signature bond, cash bail, they can get supervision with us either way. We have those four different supervision levels. For us, those are determined generally by the PSA, and that's when the social workers will meet with staff to work on ensuring that they follow their bail conditions. Again, that is GPS monitoring, alcohol monitoring, drug testing, hooking them up with supports in the community, making referrals for peer support and assisting so that they are, again, trying to ensure that they make all of their court appearances and commit no new crimes. Our program is very successful as far as those numbers go. I think that's on a future slide, actually. We'll get to that. So next slide, please. Kind of what I had talked about, essentially the supervision level is determined by the PSA and a combination of that on the professional judgment. The conditions, though, are determined by the judges and commissioners. We have no discretion over those conditions whatsoever. While we can implement the use of a wait list, we are not screening any individuals in any way, shape, or form. So those, the judiciary will decide whether or not they have any of those conditions. Again, the GPS monitoring, alcohol monitoring, drug testing. Caseworkers then make the referrals for community services and resources, and then they will report any violations. That's another area we have no discretion on those referrals, but also in the violations, the reporting, or the responses. Unlike, for example, like a post-conviction supervision program, all violations are reported back to the judge, and the judge decides what to do. So they may decide to make no changes, schedule a bail hearing, increase supervision, or even issue warrants. Ultimately, we are meant to be kind of neutral, third-party fact-finders. We are just reporting the facts back to the court to make that decision. Next slide, please. Back to the aforementioned statistics. So across all defendants in pretrial status, approximately 69% make all court appearances, 77% have no new offenses. For pretrial defendants in 2025, both of those numbers were 92% for our population. So it is a very successful program. We do do what we hope to do. So I think that the hope and the the goal in the future would be to kind of expand that because we believe that our services are successful in helping those individuals avoid incarceration, avoid new charges through those support services and through court reminders. So I know that in general, when Colleen kind of talked about like the FTA project that's going on, that's something that I'm involved in as well. And so we're discussing ways that potentially we could look at the program changing to be more of help in those areas in the future. All very preliminary, but certainly we are reassessing how to allocate our resources in the program to be most effective in those areas. Again, our numbers are a bit lower than usual. We have about 105 clients, so even numbers I reported are slightly higher than they were even earlier today. So we actually have about 105 on supervision, about 57 on alcohol monitoring, and about 32 on GPS. And then the median days on supervision is usually between like 150, 180 for most individuals. And then again, when looking at our rates for making all their court appearances and no new offenses, it's in 92 for each of those categories. But in 2025, we had 801 cases that we closed. And across all of those, we had about an 84% success rate. So combining, meaning those individuals had, they made all their court appearances and they had no new arrests. We would have obtained all that information because we completed the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab technical assistance. They helped in kind of looking at our data and then generating a tracking system for future outcome analysis. We work again closely with Colleen's office in making sure that I provide that data and then they can translate that into outcomes for us. And then, let's see, I will say that while we are down with our numbers, we do have a plan in place for, again, 2027 in kind of looking at our budget and the way that the wait lists go will probably be closer to approximately 150. individuals at any given time. And it's about 75% of what we were operating at before. To get to that number, we obviously renegotiated some of the costs, but we're also using some of the data that we have and some of the education to work to reduce usage of electronic monitoring amongst the judges by providing more frequent updates, showing the individuals who are compliant with our program, saying, for example, this person's been on GPS for six months, for example, they've had no issues. This might be an appropriate person to remove because again, the vast majority of individuals are going to be successful in their pretrial time. So we want to keep those resources for the most kind of severe cases or the cases where we're most concerned about public safety or them attending court. So we have some plans again to have those numbers be more steady in the future. Next slide, please. However, we do have some challenges. We, as I noted, have two pretrial services assessors. Last year, they completed about 2,253 PSAs, but there were 1,636 eligible defendants who were not assessed due to workload constraints. So essentially, I would need a third assessor if we wanted to be in alignment with best practice, doing a PSA for everyone who's incarcerated. However, I do know that the use of the PSA will be discussed at that CJC and the CJC pretrial joint meeting in July. So I know that that will be an entire discussion that will come out of there largely because I believe that the... The consensus has been whether or not we are kind of using that data, whether it's impacting those decisions and whether we should be, again, reallocating those resources to other more impactful efforts. But again, that's a discussion we'll be having in the future. I know that it'll certainly impact some of the decisions that I make or some of the recommendations I might make about budgets in the future. Otherwise, again, all of the electronic monitoring is typically where our challenges are gonna be. Again, you would have received the letter. We're at that point where we needed to decrease our usage by approximately 40% across 2026 for us to maintain funding throughout the year. Even with that, the implementation of the wait list and other programmatic changes in that education element, We are looking at running out of funds essentially at the end of August so that we would have to remove everyone from electronic monitoring the end of August and then not have anyone September through December. I have made the exec team aware of this, and we are working through and discussing possible solutions, brainstorming for the possibility of a stopgap. But I do know that that's something that, again, that the executive team is looking at more specifically. So I don't have any answers on that. I just... I want everyone to know that I'm aware, cognizant, and we are working on it. But then the other concerns that you may hear about in some way is that pretrial monitoring of GPS violations. My office is not a 24-7 office. So for example, if somebody's on GPS, they cut their bracelet on a Friday night, we will not know until Monday morning. So we're unable to report that to the judge until Monday morning. So there is concern, certainly about victim rights and about victim safety. And I know that it's something that's come up, especially because there was an investigation by the Crime Victim Rights Board. So it's something that I've been regularly discussing with victim witness in the DA's office to brainstorm some solutions. We've made certain changes about those types of issues. Notifications, but it is, of course, a cost consideration. It would be about $20,000 to $30,000 to be able to have those individuals monitored 24-7 to meet that burden for victims. So again, just an area of concern that you may hear about from the district attorney's office or from victim witness that we are actively working on. And then again, what I had mentioned before, lost equipment is a large portion of our budget, costing $40,000 to $60,000 annually. We are doing certain things within the office to try and recover those pieces of equipment more frequently, sending out envelopes directly to clients' homes so they don't have to report into the office to bring things. But it's just an area of continued challenge as we go across the years. So then from there, Next slide, please. Outside of all of this, if you'd like to learn more, we are on the fifth floor of the courthouse. You can stop by at any point. We have a lovely little lobby that my staff work really hard to put a bunch of resources up. We have a ton of brochures and things so that even anyone who happens to be in the area can look through if they need housing support, for example, or employment resources, things like that. You could also schedule time if you'd like to come to the office. I am much less fun to shadow, but I do have social workers who are willing to have anyone kind of sit through and then learn what we do more specifically answer any questions and then we certainly have some resources on our website pretrial-services at danecounty.gov that is it for me so last slide is just do you have any questions

Awesome. Thank you, Director. Any questions?

Go ahead, Suarez-Lewis. Thank you very much for the presentation. It is amazing to see the success rate, the 92%. That is wonderful. Could you tell me again, you listed out the cost of ankle monitoring and breathing into the machine for alcohol testing. Were those costs per day? Sure.

Sure, yes. So the specific costs that I would have talked about, yes, the $350,000 for remote breath, $650,000 for CAM, $275,000 for GPS, those are the daily costs for all equipment. So historically, we had spent close to about $25,000 a month when we were at kind of full capacity. Right now, we spend probably about $15,000 a month on electronic monitoring.

Okay.

Thank you.

Other questions from other supervisors? Not seeing any. Oh, Supervisor Feldman, go ahead.

Sorry, I was just making sure everybody else got monopolized time again. Thanks, Shannon, for the presentation. I'm trying to remember this. 144 days. Was that expected to be that high? I think it was average, moderate.

I think that what I will say is that, I mean, ideally it probably would be a smaller number. I think that when you talk to the judiciary, there are a number of different factors that kind of go into how long a case can take, whether an individual is able to obtain defense counsel. And I know there are wait lists, of course, for the public defender's office. They have certain rights for rescheduling, things like that. I know that Certainly they are hoping to resolve those cases as soon as possible, but definitely most of the time an individual who's referred to our program is going to be on that program from their initial referral in like IA court through the completion or resolution of their case. So I do think that it is an area that we could work on reducing that number if we were able to encourage people to be removed from our program. Again, like if they're doing really well, if they're complying with the conditions, bond conditions, then ideally they'd be able to be done with our program before even the resolution of their case. So it is something that we're working on reducing.

Okay, because I just wonder if that puts a strain on not having enough monitors and then for folks.

Yeah, absolutely.

Sorry. And one other question. Sorry, I'm trying to do this. Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought. I'll ask this then of Chris. What kind of strain would that be on the jail chief deputy? If we had to reduce the monitoring.

They haven't put it in our custody as opposed to monitoring would be right.

If we have this issue with the funding.

It would be significant strain in the jail.

I mean, we have to be sending people out. Yeah, it'd be more OK. Thanks a lot. So I mean, that's just obviously consideration then. Oh, I know what it was. Sharon, the monitoring where it's not 24-7, would that be, it is, but nobody's there to watch the, nobody's there to monitor it, you said, because you're not 24-7?

Yeah, sorry, I should have clarified. Certainly the device is working 24-7. We can go back and look at all that data, but yeah, there is nobody in my office who's able to see any of the alerts that are generated until we'd return for business hours. Mm-hmm.

How do you get them? Are they when the monitor is it is it a program or is it something?

Yeah, we work with our vendor and essentially we have it set up so that, for example, if a person has said that it's based on the bond conditions. But if it says, for example, they cannot go into the 100 block of Main Street, we would create a zone in the GPS area. It's a big red zone. And if they enter that, there is no like grace period. If they enter it, we will get an alert sent to our email saying that they have entered that. And then we would send that information. Occasionally, there are circumstances where it's not a true violation. So it's important that we have a staff person look at it. If they, for example, drove past an area and there was kind of what's called like a tossed or thrown GPS point, like... GPS isn't always 100% accurate as far as the distance, but we can look at those types of things, like how accurate is this point? How many GPS satellites were used? What is the radius of this particular point? And so we look at all of that to determine if it's a true violation, and then we report that to the court. But the notice to us is kind of instantaneous within the software.

And I know this would be a strict budget, and I understand that, but in looking at public safety, and maybe with we have to be somewhat concerned when people are cutting their bracelets, their monitors. Is there a way if you had on-call staff to monitor it? And I guess I just think of this because when I was on Public Works, the directors can, when they're flaring and the engines are running to convert the gas, they can monitor that from their phones. Because if they say, if they go out, they're running now, make sure that's going back online. So I'm just looking at, you know, a different department, looking at an issue that a 24 seven, you know, how do you, how can you handle that?

Sure. It's a complicated question in that, yes, the technology exists. I mean, I could get a text message alert for any of this automatically. I could be on call. I could receive those things. Where it gets a bit muddy is that we, again, have no discretion over the response. So what kind of comes into the discussion is for a lot of violations, they are violations of bond conditions, but they aren't necessarily like new criminal behaviors. So there have been times where, for example... we will decide that we're going to send that information that this constitutes a real violation. We send it to the judge and the judge decides not to do anything about it, that they make no change. So because they are ultimately the final decision for what should occur in response, even if I were to get that information, I'd still kind of have to send it off to a judicial official to make that. And naturally that delays things. So I think that what we've been exploring instead has been kind of the use of victim notification tools rather than tools that kind of notify us automatically about violations. Instead, for example, our vendor has an app where a victim could use their phone to create kind of a mobile exclusion zone. So basically, if the individual on GPS came within a certain distance of them, their phone would then kind of ping them a notification saying, for your own safety, you should leave this area, contact this person for safety planning. So those are the types of solutions that we're looking at because it's important that we are not trying to impinge on defendant rights when they're not convicted, but also that we are not kind of superseding the judicial authority to make decisions on those bond conditions. So there are there definitely tech like the technology exists to do it, but we are exploring the different options so that all the different stakeholders are involved.

All right, thanks.

Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you so much for presenting tonight. Thanks for all you do and hope to hear more about some solutions for this problem that's rapidly approaching.

Yes, absolutely. As soon as we know something, we'll update everyone. All right. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, thanks. All right, that's our presentations for the evening. Thank you, everybody, for your great questions. We will continue to have presentations in July and August. I'm not sure we'll wrap them all up in August. Today I got away with three, but I'm not sure we're always going to be able to do three. But we do have a few more. and we'll get those scheduled. I wanted to remind people we have a meeting on the 21st of July, we have a meeting on August 18th, and a meeting now scheduled for September 22nd. Right now, I may have mentioned this, I will mention it again, every Tuesday in October we have a PPNJ scheduled. I don't know if we'll use them all, but I certainly highly recommend everybody put that on their calendar and be ready for our budget meetings. And, you know, we'll talk more about that as it gets closer. Is there any other future meeting items and dates that anybody wants to talk about? Anybody wants to see on an agenda? Not seeing any at this time. All right, we're going to move on to public comment and items on the agenda. We don't have anybody registered for any public comment. Items such as other business as allowed by law, there is none. And I would entertain a motion for adjournment. Thank you so much. Have a good night, everybody.