Law and Justice / Human Services Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning. The Snohomish County Council Health and Community Services Committee will be called to order. Today is Tuesday, October 14. It's 11AM. We're meeting in the Jackson Boardroom and also remotely. Before we get into the agenda, I'm going to read a brief public comments script. We'll We'll be taking public comment beginning with in person and then remotely. In Zoom, click the hand icon to raise your hand. If calling by phone, press 9 to raise your hand. When called upon, press 6 to unmute. Each speaker will have three minutes to speak, and please start your comment with your name and your city of residence. And now we'll do roll call.

Committee Chair Meade?

Here.

Vice Chair Lo?

Present. Committee

Member Nearing?

Here.

Committee Member Dunn? Here. Committee Member Peterson? Chair, there are four members present.

Wonderful. Thank you. Now we will open up public comment. First, for anyone in person. I don't see any takers. Do we have any hands raised online?

No hands not raised. Wonderful.

Thank you. So we'll close public comment. We'll get into our action items. First is item one, motion 20 five-four 50.

Good morning, counsel. For the record, Nicole Goreley, counsel staff. Annually, the county receives grant funds through a state federal grant agreement for the county's Area Agency on Aging Plan. This grant was anticipated in the 2025 grant work plan. However, the county was awarded $1,498,831 more than what was anticipated.

Therefore, council approval is required to accept the grant. The new total grant amount is $21,447,956, and a breakdown of the spending is provided in the staff report along with exhibit b. I will note exhibit b originally submitted is an old version and does not contain all of the funding, so today's request is twofold. One is to provide the clerk's direction to replace the current exhibit b with the one that I provided them, and then the second is to move this motion to GLS tomorrow for consideration.

Great. Thank you. Is that the staff report?

Yes. Do you

have any questions from council members? Any objections to asking our clerks to swap out the exhibits? Okay. And any upset any objections to consent for tomorrow? Right. So with that objection, we will do that. Next will motion next will be motion 25 dash four three one.

Last year, council approved a template agreement for the health department to use in partnering with local schools to provide internship opportunities to students at the department for the purpose of promoting public health as a career path. Motion 25 dash four three one would approve one of these agreements with the University of Washington Seattle campus. The agreement will be in effect until terminated by either party, and today's request is to move to GLS October 22 consideration.

Thank you. Any questions, comments from council members, objections to consent? Alright. With that objection, we'll move that to October consent agenda. Next will be motion 25 dash four three two.

A nonprofit called Sound Foundations for Public Health wishes to provide Snohomish County Health Department with a grant in the amount of $31,550 to be used for hosting a minimum of five vaccine clinics throughout the county. By accepting the grant, the county agrees to creating partnerships with community organizations to host these clinics, provide vaccinations to at least 200 residents, conduct outreach, procure the necessary supplies, and provide reports to the foundation, including reports on each clinic held. The contract runs from execution through 06/30/2026. Because this grant was not anticipated in the grant work plan, council approval is required. Today's request is to move to GLS October 22 for consideration.

Any questions or comments from council members until we're done?

Yeah. Thank you. Who's the grant from?

Sound Foundations for Public Health. But that was

a foundation that we created through the health district. So how did they receive funding?

I'm not sure about that history. I could not find I did look them up online. I couldn't find a website that was active. I did verify that the nonprofit is still functioning and in good standing with the state. But in terms of the history behind that, I can't speak to it.

But the the funding is coming from?

The foundation to the health department.

Okay. Thanks.

Other questions, comments from council members? Are we alright with consent? Okay. Then we will go ahead and move this item to October consent agenda. Next will be motion 25 dash four four three.

In accordance with RCW 70 dot zero five dot zero eight zero, the health department may enter into agreements with other health departments or districts to provide health officer coverage to ensure continuity of services should the county health officer be unavailable. Motion 25 Dash443 would approve an agreement with the Tacoma Pierce County Health Department under which both county health departments agree to provide health officer coverage for the other jurisdiction when necessary. Because the service goes both ways, there is no exchange of funds, and today's request is to move this motion to GLS tomorrow for consideration.

Thank you. Thank you. Questions, comments from council members? Any objections to consent? Alright. Then we will move this to October consent agenda. Next will be motion 25 dash four four two.

In 2023, council approved a template agreement for the health department to use when entering into agreements with local jurisdictions under which the department provides the jurisdiction with naloxone at no cost with the purpose being for that jurisdiction to leave it behind with individuals they come into contact with. Motion 25 dash four four two would approve one of these agreements with the city of Everett. The contract duration is from execution through 12/31/2028 and has an option to extend one additional three year term. Today's request is to move this motion to GLS October 22 for consideration.

Thank you. Questions, comments from council members? Objections to consent? Okay. Then we will move this to October consent agenda. Next will be motion 20 five-four 64.

Motion 20 five-four 64 would approve amendment number three to the health department's contract with Quest Diagnostic Clinical Laboratories for laboratory testing and diagnostic services. Under the amendment, the contract duration will be extended to 12/31/2026, and additional 25,000 will be added to the contract maximum from fund $1.25. Today's request is to move this motion to GLS October 22 for consideration.

Thank you. Questions, comments from council members? Objections to consent. Then we'll go ahead and move this item to October consent agenda. Those are action items. We do have a discussion item. It's a presentation from our Department of Emergency Management. So we have Director Schmidt here, and she will be presenting to us. Welcome. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. Good morning, everyone. Lucia Schmidt, director of the Stormish County Department of Emergency Management. And so what I wanted to talk with you all today is it is just contingency planning at this point. We have a number of federal grants that our ability to accept them is in question, and, ultimately, it comes down to about a third of our core emergency management staff whose funding would be at risk.

And so I've been going out and speaking with all of our partners, so other department directors, the local jurisdictions we have in our local agreements with. We're gonna go meet with the fire chiefs just to make sure that all of our partners have awareness of the impacts and can provide. We just want to talk through potential responses. But it's all contingency planning at this point. Nothing is final, as I will go over.

So next slide. So DEM relies on three primary FEMA grants that have been reliable year to year since before DEM existed as an agency. There is the Emergency Management Performance Grant, which is the most flexible. And we have over two people on that grant right now. It funds things like outreach, mitigation, planning, and training.

It essentially covers anything an emergency management does, is eligible for this grant. It has been a lifeline for emergency management organizations across the nation for decades. And then we also rely on both the Urban Area Security Initiative and the State Homeland Security grant programs. These are terrorism related grants, so activities need to have a nexus to terrorism, but we have been using them to fund training and exercise, a lot of our readiness capabilities, our operational readiness posture, our capabilities assessments, public information, and grants management functions, we've all been we've been covering under this grant. Those ones combined, we have just between those two grants together, we have just over two FTE on them.

But that one is also a multi year performance period, so we've got a little bit of breathing room on that one before we lose staff. Next slide. So here's what it looks like for our org chart. I have the squares that are x'd out. That's our opioids program and our nine eleven support program.

So those have funding that's pretty well blocked off. We can't use those staff or that funding for core emergency management functions. So those are the five boxes that are squared out. The light blue is our general fund funded positions, and then the red shows the cumulative impact impact of those three grant programs. Now you'll notice that many of most of our positions are are the grant funded positions are covered by multiple funding sources, and that's because the terrorism grants in particular don't allow us to cover some of our things like the duty officer program.

And so we like to cover people with multiple funding sources so they can do things like respond to the EOC for flooding events that we expect of all of our staff. That gives us some flexibility in terms of which functions we ultimately decide to cut back if we decide to cut. And so that's one of the reasons we're having these conversations is it's not a very clear one to one line of the funding gets cut so this particular program goes away. We have the ability to prioritize and make decisions accordingly. And I do want to note that this org chart does show thank you all last year you moved the radio officer onto the general fund budget starting in 2026.

That change is already reflected on this org chart. Next slide. So the status of these grants. So the grants are out there. FEMA has awarded the grants to the to the state.

The state receives all of these as pass through or sorry, the county receives all of these as pass through from the state. The challenge that we have is that FEMA has attached terms and conditions that violate state law, largely related to immigration and using local funds to support federal immigration operations. So the initial awards have been given to the state for all three grants, and the state filed a suit, Illinois v. FEMA, to challenge the immigration terms and conditions, And they were successful in their initial the trial hearing. The judge ruled in the state's favor that those terms and conditions were arbitrary and capricious and that they violated the conditions attached to the spending clause and any more than that you'll have to talk to the PA's office.

What we hear from the attorneys is that protects the state from those terms and conditions. It does not necessarily protect us as subrecipients of the grant. So we have separately filed suit in Santa Clara v. Nome in order to protect to reserve our rights and to protect ourselves from the immigration and the DEI terms and conditions so that we can receive the funding that is critical to our services without violating state law.

A question on that.

Yeah.

If it's okay. Sorry. Chair, is that okay?

Yes. Okay. Are

those different conditions you mentioned, the immigration and the DEI, are those separate? Are they attached together? I don't know if that question makes sense. Like, if let's say we're in compliance, but one with the but not the other, would we be eligible for grants, or do you need to be in compliance with

We need to be in compliance with all of it. And what we hear from the attorneys and PA's office can give much better insight is so the challenge is there's the the false claims act, does not apply to states. It does apply to us as local jurisdictions, and that would potentially hold us liable up to three times the grant award to pay back to the federal government if we're found in violation of any of the terms and Because

some of them, you know, are within our hands as a county, but the immigration is a state one. So there's not really a whole lot we can do about it either way. But but I'm hearing it. It doesn't matter whether we can take any action as a county.

Right. Okay. Thanks. And then separately for so after the award was given, I guess between when the notice of funding opportunity went out and then the award was given, FEMA changed both the award amounts for the Homeland Security Program and the performance period for all of the grants. So the states then sued again, this time in Illinois v.

Nome. And so now there is a temporary restraining order on the funding until that one makes its way through the courts because they did not want FEMA to start issuing the amounts until the funding amounts claims had been adjusted. I don't know the status of Illinois v. Gnome and when that will have a hearing date, but Santa Clara v. Gnome, which is the one we have signed on to, I believe currently has a hearing date of October 22. We believe that will likely be pushed back to November 19. So that's when we'll have update on our ability to receive these funds. Any other questions on that? No. Great.

Next slide. So the other changes I don't I can't talk about the changes in our federal funding without also addressing the bigger picture changes that are happening related to emergency management at the federal level. We know that the thresholds for declared disasters are going up. This has always been it is a presidential authority, their decision, their prerogative to determine whether an individual disaster gets a declaration or not. Historically, there have been kind of predefined thresholds that if a disaster meets that threshold, the president declares.

The current administration is signaling they want to quadruple those thresholds and are starting to and that's why we saw with the bomb cyclone that we had last November, we didn't get the declaration. Essentially, the state's threshold is going from about 14,000,000 to about 60,000,000 in order for to for any jurisdiction in the state to receive a threshold. The state cumulatively has to have about $60,000,000 worth of damage. So we're less likely to see funding to recover from disasters. If we do get a federal declaration, we're also less likely to see some of the federal support that we rely on, things like staffing disaster recovery centers, which is where our residents could go to find out what they might be eligible for and sign up for different programs, things like FEMA has historically had direct survivor assistance teams that go out door to door and help people sign up.

Those teams look like they will be going away, and so those responsibilities would fall on locals and states to staff disaster recovery centers to go out and help people sign up. So we're looking at just increased responsibility at the local level for responding to those major disasters. Boiling down generally to FEMA wanting to focus more on immediate recovery or immediate life safety, immediate response, and being less in the recovery game, whether that's recovery of public funds or recovery of individual losses. We also know that mitigation funding so they canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant. That one is also the state has filed a lawsuit along with a number of other states.

We should know by the end of the year how that will look. But so the state has filed for the BRIC grant to be reinstated. But right now, the funding that local jurisdictions across the nation have historically relied on from the federal government to help us improve our infrastructure so we're less exposed to natural hazards, that funding has gone away, meaning which is a very tricky combination when you're looking at also less recovery funds if your infrastructure is damaged. And then all of this is subject to what is happening with the FEMA Review Council. We should be hearing their final report soon, but waiting to see whether what the posture of the federal government will be in emergency management generally.

The talk that we're hearing is that they want to shift more responsibility down to the local level. Next slide. So the steps that we have taken to look at this potential funding issue: We have had discussions with county departments on shifting functions and costs. Specifically, we have our the county's hazard mitigation plan is up for renewal, and we are it's out for public comment right now, but we're in the final stages of getting that across the finish line. We really want to get that plan done.

It is a requirement in order to be eligible for certain federal funds. And so we've had a conversation with the other departments that have a lot of mitigation actions in the plan to help ensure that we if we do not get this funding, that we could potentially keep the planner on board until that plan is completed, which is just through the February, allowing for FEMA approvals. We've also had contingency conversations with the interlocal agreement with the jurisdictions we have interlocal agreements with. Those conversations are ongoing, essentially looking at whether we want to raise rates to fill the gap, whether we want to cut services to acknowledge the funding loss, or find some combination of the two. We have kept a position vacant at DEM.

We saw that there was going to be concerns with many of our grant streams, and so we let a position sit vacant. That is why even though the Emergency Management Performance Grant funding ended at the September, we have not had to lay anyone off yet because we have been accumulating salary savings, and we have a vacant place position to move someone. We're also using some of that salary savings, though that position had work they needed to do, so we are bringing on a consultant to help perform some of that work. So we don't have a tremendous amount of salary savings, just enough to buy us some breathing room. And then we've done an analysis of our legal requirements.

So looking over what is it that we are required to do, what by the feds, by the state, by county code, and trying to find just analyze all of the services we provide in terms of what we must do, what we should do, what we could do, and what we potentially won't do anymore. So here's what we have found. So per state code, we need to have a comprehensive emergency management plan. We need to provide alert and warning to the public if there is an imminent life safety disaster. That includes providing that alert and warning in all of our primary languages, so any language that's spoken by more than a thousand county residents.

We need to have the Emergency Management Office to process temporary emergency worker claims. So every time there's a search and rescue mission, if someone gets injured or something gets damaged, those claims go through, go through the Department of Emergency Management. We need to support co sheltering with pets per the latest state legislative session and need to be available to execute and enforce the Governor's emergency orders, rules, regulations if there is a major disaster. Per county code, we need to manage the county's emergency management program. Again, we need to prepare and maintain that comprehensive emergency management plan.

We need to maintain operational readiness of the EOC and EOC staffing, coordinate with other private and public agencies, analyze our hazards that we are exposed to, coordinate continuity of operations planning within the county departments, and support our advisory boards and bodies, so the emergency management coordinating committee, which is the department directors, and the advisory board, which is the interlocal agreement members. So all of those are pretty flexible. There's a good amount of, interpretation in there. There's also looking now at the federal laws. So federal laws, essentially we have to have a local emergency management planning committee, which is a public committee that looks at all the Tier two hazmat facilities in the county.

That's a requirement from the local Community Right to Know Act, I think is what it was from following the Bhopal disaster in India. Essentially, there's a requirement to have community visibility on the hazmat facilities in the community, and so DEM hosts that. And then all of our plans need to account for pets and service animals. Those are really the two primary federal law requirements. However, there's a whole lot more strings attached to our ability to receive federal funds.

So for funds eligibility, we need to have a mitigation plan including specific strategies. We need to implement the National Incident Management System and that involves some personnel qualifications criteria that we have to meet. We need to conduct threat and hazard identification and risk assessments and stakeholder preparedness reviews. Those are on annuals and well, a three year that's two assessments there. One's on a three year and one's on a one year.

Stakeholder The preparedness review is annual. Threat and hazard identification risk assessment is three year. We need to maintain a flood hazard plan, do whole community engagement and accessibility, and any exercise we conduct need to be compliant with the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. So that's a lot. If we go to the next slide, this is what it looks like in terms of like if you're looking at the typical emergency management cycle, we say that we like to prepare, then if something happens we respond, then we recover, and then we mitigate so that we're less exposed to the hazards.

When we map out our requirements here, you can see that there's a whole lot of requirements in preparedness and response. Mitigation is largely focused on funding eligibility, and there's no requirements to do recovery planning, although with the federal government backing out of recovery planning, there is some exposure there. I think there have been no requirements in the past there because typically funding came during recovery, although if that goes away the formula changes. What that means on the next slide so we do have supplemental programs. These ones are not what is strictly required, but things that we find help us do our job better.

It's a lot easier to maintain EOC readiness and to be prepared to do alert and warning if we have a duty officer. So if we have a 20 point of contact who 911 can call and let us know if something big is going down. We maintain deployable assets, which help us maintain our relationships with our first responders, help us have visibility on what's happening at the incident command post if we are there helping them with scene lighting and setting up canopies. We have a robust training and exercise program. This is something that the training anyway is something we have really leaned into post COVID because there was so much staff turnover and because there had been a multiyear training gap effectively caused by the pandemic.

As we have closed that training gap, we are starting to scale back the training we offer in the county and starting to focus more on exercises, whether those are tabletop discussions to help just talk through how people will apply the training that they've had, how they will apply the plans that are in place, or moving up to full scale drills or simulated activations of the emergency operations center. We also have a number of supplemental plans. So volunteer and donations management is something that historically across the nation, time and time again, we see creates a secondary disaster. After a disaster has occurred. People want to help.

They send a lot of stuff to the disaster that then needs to be managed and cared for. And so having a plan in place to deal with that is critical. Right now, the county does not have a sufficient plan in place, so that is a planning activity that we were hoping to lean into in the coming years. A catastrophic annex is another supplemental plan we really have been hoping to lean into. Our earthquake risk is great if infrequent, and so having just a a framework stretched out about how the cities and towns, the fire districts will report in to to DEM so we can have a picture of what's happened in the county, report it up to the state.

I feel that is a a critical planning effort. It's something that we hear a lot from our communities that they wanna know better what our plan is. And so that's one that we hope to move into next year once we're done with our push this year of getting our basic comprehensive emergency management plan updated. Our recovery framework has not been updated since the state did their recovery they don't call it a framework. I don't remember what they call it.

But the state updated their recovery plan back in 2021, and we have not updated ours to better align with theirs. So that is a planning effort we were hoping to move into in the next year or two. And then finally, a vulnerable populations transportation framework. We just published the county's first evacuation and shelter in place annex, which moves us tremendously forward in terms of our our ability to respond and support the community if we ever do need to evacuate from a hazard. But what we do see, again, nationally, locally, the people who are most impacted by hazards, particularly hazards requiring evacuation, are the people who can't get out on their own, whether they're in home, whether they're mobility challenged, whether they just don't have a car.

Those are the people who are most likely to be most severely impacted in a disaster. And so we have a vulnerable populations transportation framework, which generally outlines how we would like to support people. But really turning that into a plan, I think, is a critical step for us being able to support our community's most vulnerable residents. We do a lot of outreach. There is no requirement that we do outreach, but when you look at the spectrum of hazards that we're exposed to and the magnitude of those potential hazards, we need our community to be prepared in order to help government help them.

There's no way we can provide everything that all 850,000 residents in Snohomish County need. And so ensuring that they are prepared to take care of themselves, to take care of their family to the extent possible allows us to just fill the gaps. That is an a never ending task, that level of outreach. It's just a a constant meeting with small community groups. There's no way to do that en masse.

There's no way to shortcut or cut corners on that. It really is individual outreach over and over and over again. And then finally, mitigation planning. So I mentioned that our hazard mitigation base plan is due in January, so we have done some contingency planning just to make sure that we can keep a planner on board in order to get that done. But beyond that, the next step would be working with, I think, believe there are 39 web different partners who would like to annex onto our plan.

So that includes cities and towns and tribes. That includes special purpose districts who would like to join on to that hazard mitigation plan so that they would potentially have access to federal mitigation funding as well. A lot of the infrastructure in the county is owned by flood control districts, is owned by the cities and towns, and so we would like them to also have the ability to access federal funding and mitigate hazards that their infrastructure is exposed to. Other things that are funded by those grants currently would be like the the personnel who provide support to departments, to fire districts if they're completing mitigation grants. One of the things I was hopeful that the the FEMA reform initiative would take on is reducing the complexity of mitigation grants at the federal level.

That does not seem to be the thread they have picked up. So if the state suits are successful and mitigation grants continue to become available, applying for those is a challenge. And so making sure that we have staff who can provide that technical expertise to help our local communities. And then annual maintenance so in addition to having the plan updated every five years, the requirement you have to maintain it annually and submit an annual report. So those are all things that aren't technically legally required, but as you see I mean I just threw up here the mitigation cost recovery ratios.

They say that generally every $1 you invest in mitigation saves you $6 in response. And again, with federal post disaster funding becoming less reliable, it becomes all the more important that we're getting ourselves ahead of the game and mitigating hazards before we are exposed to them. But these are the programs that I brought up to the advisory board of folks who have interlocal agreements with the county because these are this is this slide is where we will end up having to cut programs if we do end up losing staff. Next slide. So this I'm showing up.

This is not at all finalized, but one of the things I sent out to the interlocal agreement jurisdictions was, you know, I'm I'm most concerned about the emergency management performance grant. We have the most staff on it, and it is has already expired. We've we've expended the funds we have, so we're keeping those staff on currently just through salary savings. So if we wanted to do a replacement of that grant stream alone, this is how it would break down per in a per ILA jurisdiction. It would amount to about a 33% rate increase, which is significant, I don't have to say.

And so this is this is a topic of ongoing conversation with I'm going out to meet with the mayors again in a couple of weeks just to keep this conversation going about what direction do we wanna go. Are we increasing rates? Are we increasing them this amount? Are we increasing them somewhere less? And then also cutting services. So to be determined. And those are all the slides I have, so I'm happy to answer any questions. As I said, this is all just contingency planning at this point. Unfortunately, the potential impacts are are quite dire, so we're trying to get out ahead of it.

Alright. Any questions, councilor, when we're done?

So for this rate, this is an increase, not the amount.

This is the increase.

Yeah. And then for unincorporated, is that do we pay that from the general fund?

So that is what it would break down to. The advisory board has the ability to vote on a rate increase for the advisory board jurisdictions. They don't have the ability to vote on an increase for the unincorporated counties. So that is something that we would look at addressing in the next budget, 2728 budget.

And is there a funding source for that? Is it a general fund, or are there grants that cover it?

It would be general fund. Okay. Yeah.

And then how this is just professional curiosity, I guess, but how are you calculating the vulnerable population? Do you use age for, like, the lowest under five and 65, or is there another measure measurement so that you're planning for vulnerable population and

Yeah. For evacuation? And I'm trying to remember the term. I've heard it it expressed quite well as that rather than looking like, defining it as a fixed population, it's almost that you look at some people as temporarily abled. Right? Because it only takes a broken ankle, and suddenly someone fits into a vulnerable population even temporarily or a pregnancy. I mean, are a number of temporary conditions that can make someone vulnerable that you can't fully count on. And so one of the things that we are you know, it really does become a little bit of self identification. A little

bit of a lot of

it is working with the community to help them self identify. Some people are would be vulnerable in like, a person without a car isn't necessarily a vulnerable population until we're issuing an evacuation order, and then they become vulnerable. So a lot of it is just context dependent, depending on what the appropriate protective action is at the moment.

Well, the question comes from.

Yeah. Thank you. Great presentation. It was very informative, so I appreciate that. In particular, it was helpful to see, like, the differences between the federal requirements and local and and other services that are being provided. The next question, of course, is, like, what is the service level? Right? If cuts need to be made, like, are you are you taking out entire services, or are you adjusting levels on what's required versus needed? And then how much staff does it take to to do each of those? So those are some big questions as well. Obviously, not I don't have time to get into that right now, but I'd be interested to get thoughts on that at some point, maybe next time we do our our one on one. Absolutely. Thank you.

Mhmm. Alright. Any final question, counselor, we're done?

Yeah. I just wanna say thank you too for your efforts with NACO, the National Association of Counties, so that we're we have a good county voice addressing some of these concerns at the federal level. So thank you.

Alright. I don't have access to the online, but I just wanna make sure council member Lowe, who's online, if he doesn't have any questions or his hand raised.

No questions, but I do wanna say what a great presentation. It's really informative. Thank you.

Thank you.

Alright. Well, with that, thank you very much. I'll let you go. Appreciate your presentation, all the detail. And that does bring us to the end of our agenda for this meeting, and I believe that is our last meeting. Yep. We don't have our next committee, so council will be adjourned for the day. Thank you.