Community Services - Regular Meeting

Everybody, first, we're gonna do roll call. So I'm just gonna read off her list. I'm here. Morna is not able to attend. She had something come up at work. Leah is here. Jill is here. Tyler is not on yet? No. Okay. Leticia? Not yet. Heather's here. Barbara's here. Celeste is still Joyce is here, and Elizabeth. Okay, so we have a quorum.

Can everyone hear us online Okay?

Yes, thank you.

Perfect. The first thing I wanted to do was introduce two of our new health council members. And one of them is traveling and is going to try to pop in later. And so as soon as he comes on, we'll introduce him. But we have Rebecca White. Welcome, Rebecca. Can you just

tell

us a little bit about yourself for a minute?

Sure. So my name is Rebecca White. I've been a resident of Los Alamos County since 2019. I'm a biotech executive. I work remotely for a company headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, but we have operations in multiple states in The US and on several other continents. And I'm very excited to join the Los Alamos County Health Council and contribute my skill sets to helping us move our comprehensive health plan forward.

Thank you, Rebecca. And you are also on planning and zoning, is that correct?

Yes, that's right. I'm in my second term on planning and zoning.

So we have a connection there.

Cool. And so that brings our total to 13 because in addition to Trevor and Rebecca joining as new, Celeste also got reappointed to her second term.

We're getting up there. Okay. So on call to order, do we have any public comment on any items not related to the agenda? I'm going to use this opportunity to just introduce Ramon, who's now the director of the Larso Senior Center. Can you just say hi for a minute?

Thank you. I appreciate the invitation. I look forward to learning more about the role of the health council. I work, as you said, at the senior center, both here and in Hawaii. So thank you so much for your invitation.

Thank you so much. And Jen Demas, who's the Family Strengths Network. Can you say hi for a minute? Hi, everyone.

I'm Jen Demas. I'm the executive director of Family Strengths Network. We'd love to chat with you. Aliyah, we had her for two weeks. We're two weeks, and then she went Larsen above me.

We have a lot

of great ideas to pull our organization together. And, Family Strengths is very dedicated to Los Alamos County and making sure all our families feel comfortable and included and not isolated.

Thank you. And we have Jeremy, of course, staff. And then Trevor is on. So Trevor, we just introduced our newest members, and our newest member Rebecca. Would you like to say hi for a minute? Thank you for joining us.

Hi, everyone. And sorry, I can't be there in person right now. I'm traveling for work. I'm at a conference, that's actually related to health care, believe it or not. And so my name's Trevor Aveda.

And my husband and I recently moved to Los Alamos last year. And I have a long career working in state government. I spent ten years working for the state Medicaid agency in Colorado, and I personally have a passion for health care after spending my career working in it. And where I have quite a bit of expertise within Medicaid is how the program is financed. I I have quite a bit of experience working on the financial administration of the program.

And in Colorado, I was the special projects division director, and I helped to implement large scale financial change initiatives within the Medicaid program. And I'm really excited to be on the council, and I'm excited to meet all of you next month in person. And I'm really sad I couldn't be there.

Thank you, Trevor. Hey, Eva. We'll see you in person. So we have everybody except Marna. And she had a work emergency.

This is so exciting. Hello, everyone that joined online.

So any other public comment not related to items on the agenda? Anybody online?

Can I bring up something real quick?

Can you wait until the staff report, Tyler? And then we'll have whatever other health counselors.

Okay. Thank

you.

Okay. So approval of the agenda. Does anybody have any corrections or comments about the agenda? Okay. If not, it's approved unanimously. Also, did folks get a chance to look at the January and February meeting minutes? The February ones are on the table. January was given to you all last month. Let's both on them one at a time. So does anybody have any corrections or changes or anything we left out on the January meeting minutes?

Okay. We'll approve those unanimously. And in the February meeting minutes, I think last month, did you point out a few things on the February ones?

Did. And I didn't.

It in your packet?

That is a great assumption to me.

It was really just that we hadn't had the discussion about terms in there.

And it was that was in the January. And those, I think, had been they were corrected.

Yes. Thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate it. Okay. So then the February

I just want to mention, I noticed in section five of the February 5 meeting minutes that it shows that no update was provided by me. Provided him. Because you were sitting right there.

You did. And I watched it. I'm just going to

Lisa wasn't here.

I'm just going to grab the chair report. But there was a staff report. Okay.

Let's get that fixed as well.

So let's vote to approve it unanimously with that correction. Anybody We'll

get your notes in there.

Yeah. Does anybody have any objection to that? Okay. So we'll approve that. Thank you for catching that, counselor hand. Okay. So I think we're down to presentations right now. So my first presentation oh, first of all, I did want to let you know, in the spirit of trying to keep us to an hour

and a

half and letting everybody feel heard and participating, we have a new timekeeper. And Elizabeth is going to be our So she will hopefully get us organized.

It would be a

large clown. Right.

When she has a little time or two.

So with that, I ask for a little bit of grace if I have to step in while we're chatting to just let people know that we're wrapping up time or that we're coming to the close of it.

So no problem. So I have something. We're going to talk about discussion of any activities and or projects that we want to take on as a health council. The first thing I'd like to do is reference the subcommittee and working group section of the boards and commissions manual. And if you haven't read this or you don't know, this is pretty much our bible, running boards and commissions and just everything related, what everybody's role is.

There's another handout I gave you on roles and responsibilities for our new members. If you could please take a look at that and just sort of see if you have any questions or anything, feel free to contact me or Jessica or Counselor Hand. So we made a decision from our work plan last year for calendar twenty six that we were not going to have subcommittees. Subcommittees are really sort of frowned on by staff. Reason being and you can read through this yourselves.

But reason being that subcommittees are very formal, and they take a lot of time. Subcommittees are required to have a specific setup of people that are on the committee. They're required to have meeting minutes. They're covered by the Open Meetings Act, so you have to publish it in advance.

And

also, it's required to take meeting minutes and so forth. And you have very specific product deliverables. And so with the shortage of staff and just all the things that are on everybody's plate all the time, they really are not encouraging set meetings. Similarly, working groups, which are established per the chair, or specifically at the request of county council, if they have a very certain topic that they want to study and get public input and analyze, they'll request a board or commission to establish a working group. Right now, I believe only two boards and commissions have working groups.

Transportation has one. Correct? Or is it Parks and Rec?

Parks and Rec has many subcommittees.

No. They really don't. They don't have any subcommittees. They have two working groups. And I think those are to do with the stables. And then there was another one. But I don't know

if transportation does. Transportation, I don't think they have anything right now. They had a bicycle.

That's what I was thinking thinking of. That's

You did a working group.

Then they So they had a working I don't think there have been subcommittees for a while. The other working groups are with the inclusivity task force, because they had a specific mission. They were actually established

by counsel.

And they are requested to complete certain deliverables. So as some of you know, and as some of you were participating in, we had a working group last year to define the requirements of the Community Health Action Center. That went on for about eight months. And we submitted our recommendations.

They were approved.

And Jill was on that committee as well. They or the working group as well. They submitted recommendations to county council. They were approved in September. And we've handed it off to the county for further action, which is moving along very nicely.

We're very happy with that. So that's just a little background on subcommittees and working groups. So what Jessica and I have discussed, and Marna as well, is having activities, liaison, and projects. So what I did last week or the week before is I sent out a survey to everybody on the health council individually to find out what they were really interested interested in, what areas they would like to focus on. And I also sent you guys a copy of our comprehensive health plan action plan, which is a formal document that was approved by county council and is being here for several years now.

We're on our second year of that. So we looked at that. We also did a presentation last year, Jessica and I did, to county council as to what we had accomplished in the past year, what our focus had been on, and so forth. So I'm hoping that you guys got a chance to look at that. There are also documents in our work plan related to our funding, health council funding from the Department of Health.

And we have very specific milestones that we have to accomplish in order to receive all of our funding. And Jessica is going to talk about that in the next presentation. So what I'd like to do now is just basically have an informal type discussion. Are we on time yet? We're five minutes in.

Okay, perfect. And then I would actually like to just go up even on the whiteboard there, or whatever, the easel, and of hash this out so we can figure out where we want to go moving forward, what areas we really want to focus on, who's interested in each area, who's responsible for each area. And I'm going to kind of leave that up to the whole council because I received three responses. My last question on the survey everybody did receive the survey and had a chance to look at it, I'm hoping, online? Okay.

And in the room. So the last question on the survey was, or the comment was, the work that I am doing right now and my level of involvement is sufficient. And I prefer not to be involved in additional activities. So I just have to respect everybody's, where they are at this point in time, respect their level of commitment and what they want to be involved in and how much time. So I got three people that checked that box and responded to me that they really are not interested in taking on anything else personally.

But I did get three people that responded with a variety of things that they were interested in. So I think at this point in time, I'd like to kind of identify those. And Marna wasn't able to be here today, but she did provide some very specific input to me based on month's meeting. And just, I apologize. I'm on a decongestant right now, so my mouth is drying up. So I'd like to just put those up, we can have a discussion. We're not going to follow any protocol. Let's just have a conversation. So let me stand up.

Do you want folks online to just come off mute?

If you want to, instead of raising their hand, would you like to do that?

Or if you put it in the chat, I'll monitor the chat.

Or if you want to raise your hand, Jessica will call on you. Is that all right?

Yep, that works.

Okay. So we have about twenty five minutes.

Have about three minutes.

Twenty three minutes. Okay. Keep us on track, Elizabeth, if you would. So a couple of things. I'm going to talk specifically can you guys hear me online Okay?

If Lisa stands over at the easel, can you hear?

Can you see me? Thumbs up. Okay. I'll stand on this side. So the first response had to do with they weren't interested in leading the project, but they were interested in being involved on specific topics. One is jail. Residivism? Residivism. Reducing it, I'm assuming. Reducing.

And that's just the rate at which formerly incarcerated people end up back in the system for whatever reason that is. And it's very high in New Mexico, I do have to tell you. So that was one topic that two of our health council members were interested in. Another one was a crisis response team. And whatever collaborating and I have to say that this is an effort that's being undertaken regionally and locally and with various organizations.

I believe Jessica is pretty much collaborating with all of the involved entities.

I'll make

a note to talk

about it during my staff update. Yeah,

that's We can talk about it here. Let me just get everything on the chart, see if there's anything that anybody else wants to add. And then we can talk about that. And then the other things that I had were let me just look here. So a couple of these things, and I'm gonna read this survey response and sort of let you know how I responded to that.

Okay? So one of our council members was also interested in a crisis response team, also interested in the Community Health Action Center and pursuing that as it moves forward. So as far as the crisis response team, we will talk about the Community Health Action Center, as I mentioned, is now in the hands of the county. But the health council is available at any time, in any way. And anyone who's interested in that, we can put some names up there as well to follow-up as being part of a steering committee or just kind of reviewing what our recommendations were and where we were coming from and who we talked to, what nonprofits were involved, and that sort of thing.

So I'm going to put Community Health Action Center. And I'm just going to put it as a kind of should I call it advisory or steering? Or what should I call it?

I say call it a project.

Well, but then we're going to have to have a lead if we call it

a project. And

it's not really in our?

In our purview anymore. But we should advise. Right.

So do we want to say maybe Maybe a couple of

liaisons with the

And they haven't even created it. Have they created an So just say advise I'll just say advise. And if anyone's interested in being

I don't want to call it the

wrong thing. Well, that's what the working group was for. Right. Did all of that

advisory recommendations. So maybe it's

like a liaison to the folks in public works who are proceeding with the

Okay. Liaison to county.

Yeah. It's with the public works department now for the

Yeah, Eric. Building. Yeah, the project manager. And as I'm going to just put as requested.

You can tell it's not my world. I'm like, you know, this part.

Better known as the envelope. It's you.

Okay. Request. You said envoy?

Envelope. It's called like the building envelope. I love that.

We could be an ambassador. Okay. And then the next area that this particular counselor was interested in was advocacy. And so my response to that is we love advocacy. We will advocate anywhere, anytime for health, for community health and well-being. But typically, we work with the Alliance of Health Councils and they have contacts within the state, a lot of nonprofit organizations. And so my suggestion there is we do send out every week updates from the Alliance, which has training. It has advocacy. I took one of their advocacy classes and it was very interesting. So I'm going to say we're going to punt to the alliance.

And if you'd like to get involved in that area, feel free to any of these things are free to you. They have quarterly community collaborative forums. They have them in person. They have them online. They have the annual state alliance meeting. It was in Santa Fe. Jessica and I went in January.

We're at about twelve minutes.

Okay. Thank you. Okay. So advocacy, go directly to the Alliance. You can sign up for anything. If you have questions, contact me or Jessica. On transportation, I'm also going to punt on that one. If you're interested in local transportation, you can talk to this person named David Hampton. He's the chair of the Transportation Board. But they work on public works type things. They're not really involved in regional transportation, such as Ramon would be involved in. So we can talk to him for any efforts related to regional transportation with seniors. And then is there anything else on transportation?

I don't honestly know what the T Board does.

I'm guessing there's a layer also of people needing go up the hill for health care that don't fall into the senior model.

JULIET That's really in the senior one. And that was something that we pointed out in the comprehensive health plan as one of the social determinants of health. And so maybe if anyone has capacity to connect with the transportation board about that as a subset, how are people getting to health appointments in Espanola, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, etcetera?

I know it's been a topic at the Women's Health Task Force because they go on divert a lot. And a lot of times, women, their spouses are in the labs, and they only have one vehicle. And getting down for those as well has been

Maybe an issue for the there's a way that a group of us can talk to my counterpart of the transport the staff at the transportation board, the chair at the transportation board, say, this has come up in our health plan. And now as we're making plans, could a group of us get together and figure out where that overlap is?

And then the other The two department?

Or the two

We could just send a liaison, and then they could report back to us. Because I know that things like the pedestrian master plan, Highway 4 Crossing, P'Non Trails, and then upgrades with Denver Steel are kind of their priorities right now. But it

may be that we didn't get health needs on their list of priorities. So I'll set it up and Let do

me do this. Put it down. And we're going to take you out of the loop, because I'm not going to have you sign up for more stuff right now, because you've got so much on your plate. That's why we brought it up, what can the health council do to take stuff off your plate, right, Jill? Okay. So you don't get to sign up for it. She's going to send you an email. Okay. One more area was housing. Housing is huge. We know. And I suggested this person contact. And I think what I'm trying to say is if people are interested in these areas and we don't identify as a project or as a liaison, just go talk to them. Email Stephanie Knockley. Send her a friend request on Facebook.

She's the guru. She's the expert of housing. Dan

I say that we will meet anyone for coffee. Yes. Stephanie will meet anyone also. Super available.

There's actually this cool thing that we did last year. And my husband and I went to a lot of them in Santa Fe. It's called Livability. They have a Livability suite. And they get urban planning experts and people literally from all over the country and the world. And they're looking at all these issues in Santa Fe and affordable housing and so forth. Well, this time Stephanie's going to be in Albuquerque. And I can send you it's next week in the evening at the Hispanic Cultural Center. But if anyone's interested, feel free just to show up. You can attend any board or commission in the county that you want.

Just show up. I'm sort of working with the Inclusivity Task Force. They put me on one of their working groups for economic what is that one?

Economic Sustainability Board.

So James is leading that.

Was thinking about Lisa, sorry, thinking about some of the stuff we're talking about here where there are other entities that are working on them that one of us could potentially be involved with and then bring information back to the board if there are potential recommendations

to the That's what I'm saying.

Do we have and this is just for someone who's a relative newcomer, both to the county and to the council.

Do we

have a list somewhere? Would it be possible? Potentially. And I don't know how the groups are going to break out in the end. If we group or communications group or something else where we would compile a list of boards that we

There is a list. It's online. The list of

a list of where we all have

Or where the council would be interested in having some

I will put that back on you. Go to the county website. And under boards and commissions, it has a list of all the boards and commissions. It has any of the working groups. It has the contractors. It has Scott. And so you are welcome to attend any of their meetings and what have you. Next health council meeting, I'd kind of like to have a roundtable to talk about a follow-up on this, I think. So would that be Okay with that?

So maybe some of us

You could say, Okay, Lisa's working with inclusivity. Jill's working with sustainability or whatever.

And transportation and housing.

Lisa's working

with the senior center. This is what they're doing. Does that sound Okay? Yeah, I can gather

some information about what we're already

involved in. I think that was it from this that was it from this individual. Now I do have, I'm sorry, I have one more person that had given me kind of detailed feedback, so I do want to honor that. This counselor felt that we needed sort of a communications lead. And this sort of dovetails back into what you said, Elizabeth.

Somebody who is keeping track of all the health related events, sending out emails that would talk about any health type events that are coming up within the community. They could go on Family Strengths Network. They could go on They could go on any of the other websites. One really good source of information, which I use all the time, is the Facebook events. Because pretty much everybody advertises on the Facebook events. I know your tea is coming up. Yeah, just all kinds of things. And so that, I just add them straight to my calendar. But if we feel like we need a person for that, I'm going to write it down and we can talk about it. Okay?

And then the next one, I'm going to talk while we're learning. And some of these might be just individuals assigned to this or volunteering for this. And some of them may be like little teams and stuff. And then the next one we already have, and I want to honor that as well, and Marna and Celeste, hi Celeste, you're online, is the directory of providers. And so we definitely this is already an established project.

I'm going to put that at the top of the list here. Okay? And right now it's Celeste and Juan. Okay. And so in the spirit of trying to stay on time, they said grants lead. And this wasn't a person to identify what grants the health council should apply to, but to maybe identify any grants out there that some of the nonprofits that we liaise with might be interested in, might not know about. I don't know if we need this decision or not. We can sort of take the temperature on that.

It's a joke. Scrolling through. Off. So

Your eyes just glaze over. The

other one and I don't know. This could even be tied to the first one, is a community outreach lead. This was one that I suggested just because it would be helpful if someone else would be interested in taking this on. And this is just to get volunteers for our various events and to manage our articles sign up. I don't

That would be under your community.

You want to do that under that one?

Yeah. That's a conversation So

this would be events and then articles. Then Outreach. Okay. Outreach. At events. And the other events would be events within the county. Okay. And then I think I only have one more. Jill, you can speak to this one. Grandparents and grandchildren.

Intergenerational. Tell

me what you're calling them. Actually, I think has done awesome with the what's it called? First Family? Firstborn, thank you. Have you already had the event? Yes, we do. Okay. So the connection is to kind of create the dating service. And you've already had the first event? Did it Yes, go last week.

How did

it go?

A dating service. That was cute.

Oh, it is. Matching seniors

and With young families.

We've families that have

a son expressed interest in that.

Okay. So what do we call that, Jill?

Oh, that's just intergenerational He talked about it as found family. Where can you

when you live here,

you don't have family members. And how can we find that family? It's addressing the social isolation piece of the social determinants of health. Just per an earlier comment, I helped everyone get together. But I did not take the lead on this project. So I already wasn't taking the lead on something. All right. We got it done. Others got it done. I think it's so exciting for the community.

Larso and the health council and whoever else And firstborn.

Firstborn. Really started the And

we don't have Giselle anymore.

But she's

involved in

this. Yeah.

It was Lizelle

and Jill. Okay. I just do have one more thing which would help me a lot. If we are interested in having guest speakers, I'm recommending because we had to really trim down the of this meeting, is we could potentially have another meeting that third Thursday of the month at this very time, possibly in this very room, there would just be guest speakers. And it could be county speakers.

I know the League of Women Voters has lunch with a leader every month. But if you wanted Osborne to come to talk about housing, if you wanted Tiffany Hollins to come back and talk about what they're doing in the county, if you wanted Eric Ketchum, I sent you guys I'm just so impressed with this Doctor. Eric Ketchum. He's going to be our addictions. He's the specialist throughout the county, or throughout the state, pretty much. So if you wanted any speakers, I would love for somebody to be interested in taking this on. Heather?

Or anyone online.

Is there any interest, Heather? Because she's so good at organizing stuff like this.

We're coming up on five minutes to see.

Okay, perfect. So can we have another fifteen minutes to get feedback? Because I think

If we eat the quarterly report and push it off until next month, that is one way. The other way is for the reports

to be

postponed, or some of the reports. We could either share a report and a I

can post mine. That's totally just

Because I want to hear from you. I just have been

disseminating information. Okay. So we'll kill two reports? No.

Just kill the Oh, yeah. And MDOH. And also, Crystal isn't able to be here today from DOH, so that's fine. That will give us fifteen minutes.

So I didn't get an answer from Heather, but I'm going to put this on the list here. And it's kind of different than communications lead. It's what do we want to call this? To just facilitate getting the speakers?

It's an education. It's like the public education piece of the health council. A

potential option for doing that is, A, don't do it every month.

Just one day.

True. We could do it

every other month. And

open it up to

the public. Well, think it would definitely be to the public.

It is because these are public.

And I think it would be publicly noticed.

We can advertise it, too. We can do a press release. We can do an article in the newspaper ahead of time. So that might even be something can

also we can provide

It really is community, whatever you've got up there.

Right. But this is a lot of work for one person. That's what I'd like to

make. That's how I mean, you have much of a discussion? Would you like

to do one of these, lead one of these teams?

I can lead one of these teams. But my point is we're duplicating some things.

I don't

Okay. Think Then I don't have an opinion.

Pardon? I said then you won't. I think on that one, we had so if we're talking about the communications group, if we're actually talking about creating groups, so if that's one that wouldn't be a liaison, it could potentially be five or six people. And then you could wrap some of this stuff into it. So I think as we're going through here, we're kind of identifying issues and potential actions that we want to be involved in. And then I think maybe the next phase is to shake out how those things group together and create two or three groups. Because otherwise, you could end up with one issue that only one or two people are involved in. It seems like it would be a better grouping to find similar issues to put together. So you've got a group

of five or

six people working on two or three different things. And then you don't have one person ending up working on a passion project by themselves and that kind of thing.

So let me go back to Jill, because I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just wanting to say that getting a speaker and booking it and I totally agree with you. We don't need to do it every month. Just do it whenever we have somebody interesting that we'd like for everybody to hear. Like I said, Lunch with a Leader, League of Women Voters is also open to everybody on that might be the third Thursday of the month, too. We wouldn't want to compete with that. So maybe we do this the second Thursday of the month. But that would that person's only job. And then communications would be hopefully, maybe a team, like you said, Elizabeth.

Well, I'm wondering if that part could be wrapped into communications. And one of the communications people could

be It's education and outreach

It's claims as one whole a ton of work to set that up. It might be better if a group can split tasks on that. In terms of advertising and scheduling. It's

the more the merrier because it's similarly themed. Yeah.

Okay. Communications team. And remember, we have about four people who've already said they don't have any more time. So keep that in mind. So the communications team would be for these four things, and the whole team would do that?

Stabling events. Recruiting people to write articles. Getting speakers. Getting speakers for assigned dates. And finding health related events in the community and sharing with everyone on Health Council. Events with the community,

the articles, outreach, and events that we have that we're tabling or supporting.

I'm also thinking so if we're creating some of these groups and putting them together, the groups themselves can sort of self define what they're able to tackle. So we can say, this is the concept for the Absolutely. And then the group can come back to us with their specific rates. What you're going do when you're That

group feels like they could do monthly.

Right. And there's probably other groups

that want

to be part of this. We can lead the charge as the health council, but

think foundation would probably be Right.

That's the benefit of a work would want to step

into this. Benefit of a work group is that members of the public

Working Working

group, yes, can be part of it?

Well, let's just start with us. And you can always meet with these other people outside of that. So I think that's a good list. Anybody online? Lori Padilla, do you have any

Well, she's staffed. Staffed out. Okay.

Any health counselors?

Have a comment he wanted?

He told me I'll go ahead. Rebecca, go ahead.

I was just going to say I think this sounds like a great starting place. I'm hesitant to add more because it's a lot.

It is. Thank you. As Joe mentioned, Tyler, I did defer you to now. So you've got the floor. Sorry.

You deferred to me on my thoughts on this?

Yes. Didn't you have a thought that you I

think talk about something

I think this is kind of a a heavy lift if there is overlap. Sometimes it's worth kind of looking into maybe consolidating some things just so that, like, we're not if we if we have a lot of people, sometimes it you know, like, if there is overlap, it maybe kind of reduces the the ask for the council. But, you know, we this is a good starting point, and we should be kind of able to kinda, as we go, kind of find what works and doesn't work and adjust.

Okay. So I think we'll put a pin in it here. And so all these things kind of below the line here are liaison type activities. So what I would say is if you're interested in those, just let me know. Say, hey, Lisa, I'm going to the planning and zoning. And then after you go, and you wake up, they're a little dry. Tommy, I'd like to be the liaison. And we'll just make a list of liaisons. Unless you want to do it, send out here all the boards and commissions. But as a health council, who do we want to liaise? Would you like to do that? I can commit. So thinking

about next steps for all of this, it seems like we have a good list of things we might want to be involved in.

And it

seems like the next step is to sort of put together what's a liaison, so what needs a single person, what might be a group, a project group, and then bring it back.

Then spend another half hour at the April meeting. But I think we

can maybe

I was thinking send it out to folks and see who's interested in which issues so

we can

self sort now that there's some

group interaction.

And then at the next meeting, we can say, Okay, we have only one person interested in this. I don't know if we can execute. We have six people interested in this.

We have eight people we need to

bring up down below quorum and sort of sort ourselves out as the next steps.

And I

can commit to sorry, Lisa.

No, that's Okay.

Back to your point, I can commit to creating the list of what we are involved in. I'll reach out to individual members and just say, what boards are you on? What groups are you interfacing with? And then create a list based on what people know is out there that we're not involved in. And then we'll know what we do have interface with and what we RIDDLE gaps.

What I'd like to suggest is making it a little simpler than that. Because we're all just, and Jessica is, too. If you could just take the list of boards and commissions and just send that out and say, who is interested in moving the liaison to this board or commission? I don't know that we have anything else except maybe the women's health task force, Jim. But the rest is board's submissions. If you could do that,

then I'd like to

take maybe five minutes to I can find these other teams that are specific teams. And so if you'll just humor me for a second on that, I think it might be easier to organize it that way, if that's all right. Because I know you just started a full time job.

Yeah. No, all I was going to do was gather the data, basically.

I've got the data, and I'll But send this I would like help with the liaison part. Is that Okay? You mean organizing who's No, just giving the list of the boards and commissions and sending that out and saying who would be interested in liaisoning with this. I can do that. Okay. Yeah. Just let's keep it focused so we can actually get it done. Because we've been working on this for, Lori at least six years, I think. Lori was the chair before I was. So I have a list of teams.

I didn't get any more information from you guys. So I'm going to say, let's just take a separate page and list the teams. And I think, Jill, this communications team is going to be huge. Actually, crisis response team is just a liaison too, because that's not within the health council's control. So what I'm looking at is the director of providers, which is already existing, jail recidivism whatever that part is.

The found family, which is already existing, and then communications. So I think that's those are the only four that I see would be projects, unless anyone feels differently. Jeremy, can I put the front? We have my nose. And then the rest would be just individuals or liaisons or something along those lines.

So I'm going to list the ones that are already So it would be the jail and then the community communications. Okay. Does anybody have any other ones? At this point. Alright.

Directory and directory is Celeste and Marna. Celeste, is anybody else interested in helping out with this one? And Celeste, do you want to talk about that for a second?

Anyway Oh, okay.

Can you

hear me? Yes. Hi.

I'm not an experienced Zoomer. So I I just have to tell you, I'm extremely gentle, like, because we just got back on Monday. I still pretty out of it.

But

it's it's kind you know, the short answer is yes. I would like help. Marna and I have been kind of plowing our way through it, so to speak. While I was gone, I did do a lot of work, just even though I said I wasn't going to, just kind of figuring out just exactly what my vision of this directory should be and how we should make it. And I think I've got that pretty well nailed down.

So what we have been doing today is finding resources. And I don't want to cast the net too far outside of Los Alamos. I think it would be a real mistake to make the directory like Share New Mexico because I don't think that's what we need here. I think we need the initial start. And then if you need something more or you can't find what you want, then we can give you places to look.

But I think if we start listing everything in New Mexico, it's going to be a giant mistake. And I think we need to stick to Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Espanol, that that vicinity. And so we've been pretty good at that. The next big source of resources that I need help with is I would like to go through the county list of business licenses, and I don't know how I do that. So I don't know if you can just walk up there and say, give me your business licenses. Or, you know, I I don't know how I'm supposed to do that. So that's kind of where I've been stalled out right now.

You're not sure what type

of information would be.

And we're in about six minutes.

Thanks, Celeste. Is anybody interested in helping Celeste with this right now at this point in time?

Can I make a suggestion, just because we're short on time? And this is mostly because it would be helpful for me. I think now that we have these

lists, would

To send it out?

To digest it a little bit. Just

to send

it I'm also going to have to pick. So there might be three things that shouldn't. But

I've got to

pick a favorite child

because I don't know.

No, that's a great idea. Let me just summarize this. You'll take the liaison part. I'll take the projects part. And does anybody have any more information they want to add on any of these at any point in time?

Okay. Well, I'll just write this up then and I'll send it out to the whole health council. And you guys can tell me what you're interested in, you know, how much time you might have available. That's it. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. So I'm going to talk to Jessica now. And I'll let her talk about our Department of Health, basically how we get our money, right?

Do we have time? That's on what we're punting?

You're to go for it?

Let's not punt that. Okay. Well, actually, that is what we killed to get our fifteen minutes.

Do you want to

go straight your reports? We go till 01:30, right?

So we have we have twenty five minutes of reports and updates scheduled.

Yeah. Can I do this in seven minutes since we have the seven?

Rock and roll. Okay.

Let's do And I only need five minutes from one, if that, not even. Thank you.

Let's breathe this way. Jeremy, can I ask you to pass these to Ramon and

Jen? Yes.

All right.

I will do this even faster. For those of you that are online, I sent the report template earlier this morning. Thank you to Lisa for that suggestion because I neglected to do that, and we'll get it attached to the agenda. So last month, I gave an overview of our Department of Health contract. Each county in the state that has a health council, including the tribal nations and tribal governments.

The government entity has a contract with the if it's a government board and commission, others are set up as five zero one(three) nonprofits. But there is a contract between the County Of Los Alamos and the New Mexico Department of Health that is advocated for by the New Mexico Alliance of Health Councils. So the alliance does the advocating for the legislature. The legislature says, yes, we allocate x dollars to the Department of Health to carry out community health projects. And then the New Mexico Department of Health contracts with those counties to carry those out.

Those are the deliverables that we are tasked with completing. This year, fiscal '26, which started in July we are already into March, but the contract just got formally approved at Tuesday night's county council meeting. The total amount to Los Alamos is $110,000 for completing deliverables that involve having regular health council meetings, having a roster, having regular minutes and an agenda. The way that works is every quarter, I fill out this report. Lisa thought it would be good for everyone to see it.

I did not realize when it prints, it's 19 pages long. If you're ever like We know you're paying. What does Jessica do all day? Well, once a quarter, I fill this out.

But in a database.

Right? It is.

That's why I thought you could

just send me a copy of their email. I fill it out, and then I don't get a copy of what

we fill

out. So I'll I'll try to figure that out for the April 1.

If we had all the

But it goes through a lot of the work that we do. And I I hope I made it clear in last month's meeting. Our state is really fascinating in that there is a lot of discretionary a lot is left to each county to decide how they want to implement health measures. The Department of Health has a lot of things they're interested in. We know our state is one of the lowest income, lowest education, one of the highest suicide rates, high rates of drinking drinking and driving, high rates of cancer, etcetera.

There's a lot, but each county can kind of pick and choose what it is that they want to work on. There are some health councils in other parts of the state that are working on childhood nutrition, childhood obesity. They've worked with nonprofits and schools to plant school gardens. They have a whole totally different path, which is why the state conference is so exciting. You all should come next January. Because you get to hear what everyone else is doing. Others are doing diabetes, addressing diabetes rates, trying to prevent negative health outcomes from diabetes that doesn't get diagnosed in time, and people end up having amputations, and then they need home modification, and, and, and, right? So in our county, what we've been working on for a

number of

years that I went over last month includes kind of under the general framework of harm reduction, working on the opioid overdose prevention, which includes increasing access to naloxone, to Narcan, getting the message out about suicide prevention through some of the suicide prevention trainings, building those partnerships through the community foundation and others. Part of the suicide prevention work is expanding access to gun locks. Those things are very highly correlated. And I am missing one. But we kind of keep track of all of those.

They are kind of integrated between social services and health council because we were working on the comprehensive health plan and social services has the staff, everyone is volunteers. So I think as we move forward, you were trained in suicide prevention. Jamie is also now trained, so do we do a specific training for health council members who are interested, etcetera, or for any of our contracted partners? And you can see how this all kind of builds.

Two minutes later.

Oh, sorry. Can you talk

about the project real quick before we kick?

Yes. And so there are regular I thought I could do it. You can have a look it. But it's actually gonna be ten.

You can have my time. I'll give you my time.

So there is a a standard contract, and then there are kind of extra projects we can agree to do that tie back to those things, the expanding access to NARCAN, expanding suicide prevention, expanding provision of gun locks, that are worth an extra $40,000 So one hundred ten minuteus $40.70. The contract was 70. We agreed to do extra projects related to the things we're already doing. And so that is why there was a contract amendment on Tuesday night's council because we qualified our our plan for carrying those out was approved by the state. So we get that kind of extra $40,000 which goes into social services to keep doing community health related projects.

So it wasn't a separate thing. It was just an add on to

the agreement.

It had to still be approved by budget and finance.

So we're not using it to lend a cafe for health council members.

Unfortunately, also social services staff doesn't get the hot tub and sauna that I've been asking for, nor the baby goats someday. But this is just kind of to give you a sense of how we track different things. So I always go back and count number of events we did outreach at, number of articles we put out there for public education, number of partnerships. So Larso, Firstborn, Yeah. So I tally manually tally all of those up, put it into this form once a quarter, and send it on to the Department of Health.

Is that

my timer?

It's seven and a half.

Seven and a half. All right. So I have I'm happy to answer questions.

Comment related to that. We're not taking questions right now.

Oh, Okay, sure. I'm just kidding. I will not.

But so we have the contract for it. And can we send this out to health council members? Yes. Okay. So we have the actual contract for this year for Department of Health. Itemizes. Are you guys interested in seeing a copy of that? No? Yes? Leah, are you interested in seeing a contract with DOH?

It's only five pages. You could admit to being a budget nerd. It's Okay.

It's five pages.

It's actually I don't know. It's like 20 pages. You can scroll through it. You guys, you wanna see it, Barbara? It's fine. Online? Yeah. Okay. I'll send it out to everybody. Since the report itself, I had no idea. It just went into a database into a black hole. I thought it was just a report.

And then the state collects it from all the health councils, then they have way of looking at what is happening across the whole state. I will say, at one point, I was part of a conversation where they asked, could we count the number of flyers we give out at every event? And a group of us on the call were like, no. Like, people just take flyer. You know, so they're really trying to track outcomes. How do we know people are giving this information? So it's been a lot of work to measure. Right? We can measure number of attendees at a training, number of trainings, number attendees, number of gun locks given out. It's much harder to measure the impact of the education. But the state is really working on it, and I think they've made a huge amount of progress in the past three years. Hopefully,

communications committee will be a resource to you.

And compile all of that and then send it on so I'm not literally checking all of the social service calendars, trying to figure out what we did. That would be excellent.

Perfect. It's all coming together. Thank you. So I'm going to give my chairman's report. I'm going to be very brief. I did send you guys the slides from the State Alliance of Health Council meetings. It's a two day thing. There were some specifics that were kind of related to the Share New Mexico resource directory. Was information, I think I said to Tyler, related to crisis response or the National Guard outreach in the southern counties near the border and how they were collaborating to reduce drug use and overdose. And they were working with students on that.

Did want to talk for a minute about terminology, just so we can all kind of be on the same page here. And this is just my sort of type A personality. But I think it's really important that we use the correct terminology for things. And I know at one point a person, a health counselor, went to social services and asked for a copy of the county health plan. Social services report.

I'm sorry, it was a county health report. Social services had no clue what they were talking about. I would have no clue what they're talking about. So I think it's really important to get our terminology correct. And it may take a little doing to do this, reading the boards and commissions manual, reading some of our documents that we have had published. But our official documents are kind of what we go by. For example, I hate to hear when people say social services hub because that's not what our facility is called now. It's called the Community Health Action Center. That was purposeful. That was a decision that was made by the health council and the working group.

And we vetted that with staff. And I loved seeing the email from Danielle Duran requesting information. And she said the Community Health Action Center. That's what it's called until the county changes it. Now they can have a name contest or whatever. Another thing is the comprehensive health plan. That's a formal document. It's online on our website. And our action plan associated with that is a formal. It's like the Lores recommendations and that sort of thing.

The work plan is what we submit once a year. We're in the 2026 work plan. Subcommittees and working groups are what we have when we have them. Hopefully, we won't have them this year. So I just want us to be cognizant of that, because I think it's really important. And then I'm going to defer the rest of my time to Barbara just to talk for a few minutes. We had a conversation about a site visit to Christa St. Vincent's. And we'll send out the information. But I wanted her to talk about it for a minute.

Well, as we know, Christus is moving through the bill in some form or fashion. They're still pulsing the community as to where the gaps in coverage might appear, where they could be the most useful. Basically, the word is more, not instead of, or something like that. And I think all of us would be happy to have more. There is an invitation to our council, if we would like it, to have a formal tour of the Christus Hospital in Santa Fe.

It's a led tour by people that work at the hospital. And beforehand, if we have specific places that we're very interested in. Like if you went Espanola right now, we probably would all want to see the new wing that Doctor. Ketchum? Doctor.

Ketchum. And then the new thing that Christus has built, of course, is the cancer center. But amongst all the other things that a normal hospital takes care of. But to see Christus now compared to maybe memories of Christus twenty years ago, it's transformative. And it would be possibly worth it, if you're talking about community being engaged and letting people know who we are and what might be coming up here, it might be worth it for us to physically go on a field trip instead of they can come here as a guest speaker too, but maybe as a field trip for our group at some point.

And that's a standing offer. It doesn't have to be scheduled today. You don't have to decide in your calendars, oh, I can't go tomorrow, whatever. We can discuss that and decide if you'd like to do that as a group. It'd be easier for them probably to know they're hosting the Los Alamos Health Council, as opposed to three of us, and then

one more in

Venice or something. That could probably be a more

impactful presentation from them. Perfect. Thank you, Barbara. So I would suggest let's put it on the agenda for next time. And we can discuss who's interested in going and what's a good time. We'll try to find a time where almost everybody's available, give that to you, and you can take it back to your people.

I got to interact quickly.

And Barbara's on the board of Christa St. Vincent's Foundation.

Do doodle polls violate the Open Meetings Act? I don't know.

Do doodle polls violate? No. No, because it's just collecting information. No. We're not discussing a topic. No.

We're not You're not so fond of us.

Deciding anything. You're just

just deciding a date. So that feels Okay.

So we'll put that on the agenda. How long is the score time?

I just did one two weeks ago with board members. It was about an hour and a half altogether. But it also ended with a little lunch. So people could ask questions and stuff.

Thank you. I really love having that connection. It's all about connection. So Jessica's next for the staff report. And then please leave enough time for Counselor Hand.

Know. Cool, cool, cool. I have a couple of updates to share. I'll do the forward looking ones first, and then I'll do what happened in the past month. Tomorrow, Friday the sixth, is our second youth summit.

It is taking place at Mesa Library for all high schoolers, not just those that attend the high school, but there's been a lot of outreach to the homeschool community as well. It has been completely designed by the high school students during their lunchtime and win times. We will have the library after hours. The library closes at six, so it's a little bit of, like, teen takeover. We will be there from six to eight There will be food trucks, so food is completely provided for the teens.

Free food. Chicken. There's a chicken food truck and a pizza food truck. And then the students will have their choice of eight activities throughout the three floors that align with the Sources of Strength program, which is what the high school uses, which is a really kind of hope based program at the high school. The teens had shared that they really were not fans of, if you do drugs, you're going to die, like really fear based programming.

Sources of Strength has been adopted by the prevention specialists to really have students connect with where are your sources of hope, where are your sources of strength, and really kind of building self capacity within the students. I think it's an amazing program. That's a different soapbox for another day. But it looks a little bit like a trivial pursuit piece. There are eight different sources of strength. And so we have eight activities happening throughout the three floors that align with them. So there's a physical activity one. Right? Like, do physical things give you strength? You know, your your baseball team are your friends.

Your you like to go running when you need to clear your mind, whatever that is. So the YMCA will be doing some of that on the lower level, the kids and teens level, silent disco, and some of those big yard games, like the big Connect Four games and healthy smoothies. There will be healthy relationships happening on the main level led by Jamie, our program specialist. The teens had talked a lot about not knowing how to navigate healthy relationships. And I just think this is very meaningful because we'd had multiple conversations about it.

One of the teens had shared she tried breaking up with her boyfriend and he started text bombing her saying, if you break up with me, I'm going to kill myself, and it'll be your fault. And it was just she was like, so I didn't know what to do. And we were like I mean, she's just sharing this like we're eating lunch. And it's different when you're in your mid-40s and you've had lots of relationships. When you're 15, you don't know how to navigate this.

And so I think Jamie has put together a really great we're calling it red flag, green flag, Like, what to do when there's a pit in your stomach. And the idea is that it's not an immediate red flag or green flag. But she'll have different people with scripts because it's different if I say, hey, you look nice today and were peers. It's different if you're a male boss who's a lot older, right? Or you're the older brother, but you've been hanging out a lot. And so she has set up different scenarios and then to kind of talk through that weird feeling in your stomach and then who can you turn to as a source of strength to help you navigate that. Do you want to talk about yours? Can I Sure? Give yours

a shout out.

Leah and another grief counselor, Rumi, will be leading a guided meditation, walking students through how to ground yourself, how to center yourself, I think with music, with journaling, with different prompts. So students and then the Top Floor, there's one more on the 2nd Floor. It may be art therapy, like kind of making vision boards. I'm using all of my time for this. But I'm just so excited about it. This is just such a great event for the kids. The Top Floor will have opioid overdose response with a peer specialist. I will see Leticia. Take care. A peer specialist who has had a history of addiction and is now in recovery.

Be sharing her story. And then the suicide prevention training. And so if you imagine quieter up stairs and then more hands on and then really hands on dancing down in the basement. Students will get raffle tickets. Students can they don't need to go to all eight activities if they just want to do meditation, if they just want to do silent disco for two hours. Sure. We have a ton of great prizes, a National Parks Pass, a gift certificate to Topgolf. Local businesses gave a ton. Anyways, that is tomorrow. I am still looking for yes, volunteer?

Yes. Two.

One. So one more volunteer.

I

have David

with me.

Okay. Perfect. But I'll still take a volunteer to show up at five to help with the setup and then to kind of float and just direct kids. 05:00.

Okay. We'll be there.

I think we'll give you a pizza or chicken quick.

On that.

Perfect. Thank you. I'm just so excited. The kids have just done an amazing job thinking all of this through, and it's a really fun event. Send your teens. Any teens in your life. Send them over.

Can we do this for adults next?

I would be happy to set this up.

I was thinking that. We can

make it a health council initiative. Yes. Upcoming things, we will be having there are new recruits at the police department. They will be coming to social services tour next Friday, the thirteenth. I am super proud that this will be our fourth tour with having new recruits come directly over and get a social services one on one from us.

And on Monday, a representative from transportation is coming over to join our staff meeting. You know sometimes people that need social services help have trouble navigating the buses, or the buses maybe don't run where they need it to run. And anyways, transportation reached out and said, hey, could we do a joint brainstorming and figure out how to make transportation better? Not quite off the hill for help needs, but I was thinking, yes, yes, please come, please. We're so excited.

So it just seems like a really good partnership to have the transportation folks come to our staff meeting. Last thing I will share hopefully, I'm barely over time. Last Friday, we had a fantastic training. One of our staff set it up, Denny. Our trainer for the Unite Us closed loop software came on-site, and we had 14 people from 10 organizations, including Family Strengths Network and Larso.

Stacy was there, literally getting signed up on the spot for kind of the shared goal of helping people get help when they need it, not have to repeat their story, not have to wait for them to reach out. Like, we're not giving a brochure and saying, oh, it sounds like you might want to get free lunches at LARSO. Go there. And then we don't know if they went through with it or not. We're asking people in crisis to follow-up.

And it was just, I thought, a really stellar training. Nicole's a really good trainer. We had four representatives from local churches, nonprofit, and probation. The staff person from the courts from probation was there. So That's something that

helps some workers to have.

We could absolutely do another training. I think what came out of that was we need another one for people who don't work on Fridays. Good feedback. But then we're going to have a monthly learning group so that everybody learns at the same time. So I will let health council know the next in person one. And you're welcome to join us. So the network is getting built, I'm really, really thrilled. Ten. Minute and a half. Could keep talking about the youth summit.

Just kidding. I will not. But for both of you, I will send an email tomorrow. Show up at Mesa Library at five We'll put you to work, then we'll go from there. If anybody else wants to volunteer online or here, let me know.

But I'll share a report at the next meeting. And it's being co sponsored by J. J.

B. The high school.

J. Great point, since I have forty five seconds. The grown ups involved include social services, J. J. A. B, the YMCA, the municipal courts, and the libraries. And staff from the high school. Is there press? Yes. Press releases have gone out. We are hoping to have a reporter maybe on-site taking photos. And lots of there's a banner over the overpass. It's been shared on Instagram, and the students came up with a skit that they have been sharing during morning announcements that is so adorable. Like, hey. What are you doing on Friday?

I don't know. What about you? And then they go through the whole thing, and it's just adorable.

That's cute.

Something on photographs for that night, though. We could end up with some students that are vulnerable.

For sure. So we generally do the back of their heads when they're signing in.

That is a great

point about the Yeah.

We tend to do the Thank you, Barbara.

Well, they're, yeah, acting

A lot of them like these gifts.

We have these big, neon green stickers. For the ones who don't want.

Come into our event if

they don't want their photos, we put a

big green sticker so that as Erica That's

like our marketing manager's looking she's like, not that one or cover that one. Yeah, that's great. Maybe I'll grab those.

Can we reach out tomorrow, too? Yeah. Was feeling very Sure.

Okay, now my time is up.

Okay, counselor Han.

Yay. I'll make mine very short.

Okay. And then we can talk about the I mean, maybe in for a second.

Okay. So basically, I just wanted to mention that our last regular session, which is Tuesday, we did go through all the different work plans from all the different boards and commissions and gave a blanket approval of that. I think there's probably a couple of little changes that need to be done. And one of the reasons why I wanted to bring that up is that all those work plans from all the different boards and commissions are part of the packet for that particular meeting. So if anybody wanted to go and look at what any other particular board's plan is, what they're proposing,

it might

be of interest to you. So like you're talking about the transportation rules. It's in the packet.

But I mean, where can we get the packet?

Starts online. Oh, it is online. Online now. When it's announced, when our meetings are announced, they're announced like the Friday before the Tuesday meeting.

Not the meeting, but the documents. I'm asking where

Yes, the documents are.

They're in the agenda packet. Okay. Okay. So they're online. It's through Legistar. So you just go in there, and you can find the agenda packets. And that's for any meeting.

So you cover one board at a time in your meetings, or do you cover a bunch?

We cover all of them.

Oh, Okay. So all of their work plans were used.

Yes. Basically, agenda packets are distributed to the public on Friday before our Tuesday meeting. That allows not only counselors, but anybody in the public to review all that information ahead of time so that you're not actually reviewing everything in the meeting. You're coming prepared to make any comments and you're prepared for approvals or suggesting amendments or whatever. This would be an opportunity for anybody if they wanted to look at what the other boards are doing, how their work plans are set up versus yours.

And is that a special committee or is it called what was it called?

Your meetings. So the agenda item was

It's under regular county.

It's in the, yes. So it was under council business, which is item 12. It's 12 A2. And that item was called consideration and possible approval of council's work plan review, working group recommendation on the boards and commission work plans calendar year 2026. So basically, the presenters were Tim Herman, Melanie Hand, me, and Beverly Neal Clinton.

We were the three that went through all the different work plans, made our recommendations. Updates were made. That it was submitted to the full council at our last meeting for their review and approval.

So I'm going to I'm sorry. I think maybe I didn't explain my question. Is there after they're all approved, is there a site you can go to on the county council to look at each of these individuals?

I don't think it's necessarily county council. Basically, you should be able to go to the Los Alamos County website and go boards and commissions work plans. Okay. That's what I'm looking for.

Yes. I know the process, but I'm looking for the final result. Where do

we get that? Right. So you should be able you know, the website has been improved over time. Mhmm. And so I think the search function is much better than on our previous website. Okay. That should be a way that you can get to that.

That's what I was looking for. Thank you so much. Sorry.

And that will also give you the list, you were talking about

who are

all the boards and commissions. That should give you an updated list. I think they're getting much better at trying to make sure that who the chair and the vice chair is for each board and commission, who those are, who the members are. They're just trying to keep that much more up to date. You know, because we we noticed that there were some there was old information on the website before. So that took a little longer than I thought.

I'm interrupting you. I'm sorry.

It's a busy time. It's

a we're gonna go over it then.

Okay. So, you know, we we have been basically making our consent agenda very long, which means we can blanket approve a whole bunch of things all at once. Unless a counselor comes in and says they wanna pull something from that consent agenda. So that's where you'll see all the different approvals of different members that are being recommended, new members to boards and and, like, the health council in this packet. It is.

So we'll get approved. And Yes. So that was done. The other thing I wanted to mention is that we went through our federal priorities. So this should also be available as part of the packet.

But basically, it just talks about Los Alamos 2026 federal priorities. Daniel Duran gave a summary of all the different things that went on with the legislative request, EM and NNSA appropriations, different kinds of requests for everything that the county is interested in doing, including wildfire mitigation, health,

etcetera.

Another thing to keep in mind, if you haven't seen it, there's a little card that we use. There's a working group as part of council that's for state legislative priorities. And so you know, support has access to health care, medical professionals, healthy food. So there are a lot of other things, paid family and medical leave. There are other things that yeah.

So it's just kind of our little cheat sheet that we keep. And then it also talks about what is being monitored and what is being opposed. But it just gives you a real quick understanding of what's going on, what council is supporting, and what the county is supporting as we go to the legislature. Okay. So I thought there was one more thing.

I wanted to mention that there's because it's related to the item that you were discussing in January. It's the charter. So there's the new the Los Alamos County Code of Ordinance Charter, part one Charter. K? There's a a working group on this, which are three counselors.

It's me, Theresa Cole, Dave Gregor. So we have been working with the attorney. We met with him yesterday and went over a number of things. You know, we all provided comments on some of the language in the existing charter. And, you know, the area that you're most interested in is about the boards and commissions and term limits or term.

You know, so we discussed that with him. And that's still he's going to have to go back, look through lots of other types of supporting documents to see what exactly we can do to change term limits, extend term limits, how all that is going to work based on comments that were received, I think, at a Boards and Commissions meeting recently. So all the different boards and commissions provided their input. And we're trying to make sure that we're accommodating all these different requests. I think there was a lot of consensus from some of the different boards about what we needed to do so that we have a strong membership on our boards and commissions and that we keep talented members that have contributed a lot.

We don't want people to term out and then they can't participate anymore and they may have been a real key member or something. So it's being it's being looked into. I can't say what the outcome is at this point. And that's all I was going to report on. But I highly recommend just if you're interested in more details on any of this stuff, always go online and find it in the agenda packets. And you'll know exactly what counsel is looking at and with all the supporting information.

Thank you. So I have a question on the terms. Are they looking at doing the same term for each board and commissions? The same No. They are looking at them individually.

Because a lot of them are different. Right. Know, like the board of utilities is like a five year term. Yes. Lucky me. And other ones are two year terms. And so how do you change that language to work for all the boards?

So are they looking at standardizing the outcome would be standardized then?

Or would it still be individual? The attorney is looking into it. That's all I can say.

And whether you have to change the charter or not, too. Because one of the things we brought up is some of us feel like the health council shouldn't be limited by party, by political party. Right.

And that was another part of it.

And I know Counselor Reidy is real familiar with

that issue. Because that's a requirement. Right. That's a requirement for all the boards and commissions. And that can be a limiting factor in getting enough membership. So, you know, all those were expressed to the attorney yesterday. And so we'll see, you know, how he's able to respond after he's looked into it a little more.

Well, thanks for letting us know where we are

on that. Yeah. So there's something happening, but but I can't tell you what the results

So if you all have any questions for

any of us, please feel free to email us. We do want to just talk about the next meeting for a second. I think we have

Four minutes.

Four minutes. Okay. So we did talk about a follow-up to the projects and the liaisons and so forth. So we'll put that on the agenda. We'll more info. We'll discuss when we could make a site visit to Christa St. Vincent's, to their cancer treatment facility, or whatever things we should see. And then there was one more thing.

Stephanie Gonzalez, who has often joined us online, she oversees a lot of the Medicare issues in the state of New Mexico. She works with the Aging and Long Term Services Division in Santa Fe. And she was at the New Mexico Alliance of Health Council meetings. There are several new programs under aging and long term services, including New Mexicare, which is a way for caregivers to receive reimbursement for the work that they do. Sometimes people have to leave jobs in order to become caregivers, and the state is working to do a lot more on caregiver support.

So she had asked to come to a health council meeting and give maybe like a fifteen or twenty minute update on some of the new state programs. So she will be here at the April meeting with just kind of a quick overview of that. And then I think we, social services, would like to see if she could come on-site more frequently. Don't know which is Did you lose the meeting? We totally did.

Okay. Okay. Well We

can

be adjourned.