Board of County Commissioners - workshop

Good morning. It is April 21st, 2026 at 9.01. I'm going to call this workshop meeting to order. If I could, I'm going to have Assistant Sheriff Johnston lead us in the pledge. Oh wait, I have to do, yeah, I'm going to have you do that first. Thank you. to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. If we can have roll call, please. Chair Andriola?

Present. Vice Chair Garcia? Absent. Alexis Hill? Here. Mike Clark?

Present.

Gene Herman? Here. County Manager Thomas?

I'm here.

DA Mike Large.

Present.

And I'm Jan Galassini, County Clerk.

Madam, you have a quorum. Thank you. We'll go ahead and call for public comment at this time.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We're on item number three, which is public comment. Comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person, and it may pertain to matters both on and off the Commission agenda. Unused time may not be allocated to other speakers. The Commission will also hear public comment during individual action items with comment limited to three minutes per person. Please make your comments to the Commission as a whole. First up we have Jill O'Leary.

Good morning, commissioners. My name is Jill O'Leary. A request for action is being distributed for the record. This request for GAAP and GASB compliant reconciliation of the county budget is straightforward. Our budget is not being reconciled using actual dollars for any categories, including but not limited to property tax revenue, payroll, investment income, or the state and federal grants that are subject to audit. GAAP and GASB standards require agencies to report actual revenues and expenditures, yet the county's budget is reconciled with summaries or board approved dollars. Commissioner Hill has stated the need for transparency in state tax abatements and accountability for homelessness and other mental health related programs. Those remarks prompted me to review this county's own budget reporting. What is clear from publicly available data is that over the last decade, homelessness has continued to rise. No additional shelter beds have been added, and there is no report showing measurable mental health incomes following the closure of Galetti Way Treatment Complex or the West Hills reconstruction that was approved in 2022 and still isn't being built. While significant funding is approved for mental health related processes, including competency cases now being handled within the jail, no improved outcomes to stated objectives have been reported. This request asks the county manager to use their authority over the comptroller to ensure the budget is fully reconciled with actual dollars and transparently reported in compliance with GAAP and GASB requirements. In addition, it asks the commissioners to uphold the responsibility to ensure the manager they appointed requires this compliance. Accurate reconciliation is essential for fiscal integrity, for meeting state and federal requirements, and for improving outcomes for the residents who rely on these services. Thank you for your time.

There's nobody else signed in.

Thank you.

We'll go ahead now and move to the exciting second workshop of... many more. And it's wonderful. I think the budget workshop I was sharing with the county manager that I've still received positive feedback from the budget workshop. And so I'm hoping we continued to use these opportunities to have a discussion and to actually allow for even a deeper level of transparency, which we're all committed to. So I'll now turn this over to the county manager and thanks in advance to the entire team for putting this together because it's a lot of work, but I think it's well worth it. And again, look forward to not only today, but the future workshops to come. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So, just a reminder for everyone on the agenda, we're on the item which is the main item for today. It's the Strategic Planning Workshop and updates to the Board. And the purpose of the Strategic Planning Workshop is to provide the Board with information and receive guidance for unified vision of success and expected outcomes. So this is essentially where we have gathered input from the board, we've gathered input from the elected officials and the department heads to drive towards the development of a strategic plan process. So that's what we're doing today. It's the first of three workshops where we're gonna talk about immersive and progressive solutions for the county. We as the board and staff have talked about our five year forecast and how, when we look forward at what we're projected to see as far as expenditures and then the lack of revenues to meet those expenditures, if nothing changes, we see a structural deficit coming in 2030-ish. where we don't have enough revenues to cover the expenditures. We say and we preclude that statement with if nothing changes and so the purpose of this strategy session is to talk about what needs to change and the changes and so as an organization and as service provider to the community and responsibility to the taxpayer. This is where the staff is creatively looking to do things differently they wouldn't have before. I have heard the county described as a net and that we build a net to catch people that don't have anywhere to go and that's where we provide services as a county. We can't continue to just build a bigger net. We have to be more strategic about how we address solutions for serving the community in a way that is more strategic so that we don't continue to face that structural deficit. And so a lot of the things that you'll be hearing today, board members, are around those themes. And so with that, I would like to introduce Cam. She is with On Strategy who has helped us go through this process. We've tried to make it a much more immersive process with the board, with department heads and staff, so that as we build this plan, we do it together with input from the community and such. She's going to walk us through some of the mechanics and the framework, and then we'll jump back to me. We'll do some introductions and dive into the content. Okay. It's hard to see.

Good morning. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for having me today. We're going to take just a few moments to kick this workshop off so that we're all on the same page of where we are today and where we're going and how we got here. So I'm just going to start briefly with a planning process overview. Speaking to our four phases, I do want to mention that this process is the same process that we've been going through for the past several years for the county. It is slightly altered based on the recommendations that we heard from the Rapatelis report. So some of those items that we have placed a greater emphasis on in this planning process is really in phase one. So around our collecting stakeholder input, you all were part of the interviews that we conducted at the beginning of this process. We went through several other rounds. with department heads, with leadership to get to some of the topics that we're discussing here today. Another major change is our format for these workshops. So we are conducting these three workshops talking about strategic topics that came from our Gain Insights phase rather than one large retreat, the all-day retreat. So that's a big shift for us. And then coming out of this, where do we go next, all of the information that we get from this series of workshops that we're conducting will then go to the goal teams back for building the actions that will get us to achieving the visions that you all set. So just a quick overview of what that process looks like. Of course, we're going to be coming back to you all at various points for approvals related to the strategic plan and then for regular updates once we have a final plan. I'm not going to spend a ton of time here, but just a quick overview of the agenda. We are, our theme for today is how do we shift from proactive to reactive services as manager Thomas mentioned. So there are four big topics that we're going through. Each of these topics will be presentation and then open discussion. We will take a break after the second topic or after diversion to services and just do a little reset. So if you need that in your minds, that's where we get a break. And then again, just stage setting for the day, how things are different from our past retreats. We are discussing topics today that are intended to be thought-provoking. We are not setting policy today, which is a little bit refreshing because we all get to share thoughts. And really our purpose today is brainstorming as a group on the topics that are coming forward to you all to understand where we're going to go as a county and how we expect to get there. We are also... Inspiring others to think in a transformative way. So many of the topics that we're talking about today are from departments that have a great example that we might apply to other areas. So again, that inspiring, thought-provoking. And then our last outcome for the day is education for the community, for other departments that are listening. We're all learning how the county is moving forward strategically and what those expectations should be and what they should look like. And with that, Oh, one last comment. The three workshops that we're conducting, um, have three different themes and then within them sub topics that we'll be discussing. You all have this in your pre-read handout, but there are eight topics that came up, um, from the interviews from the gain insights phase. And so all of the topics that we're discussing over these three workshops came directly from this group. and from the other folks that were involved in that Gain Insight space. So these are really the strategic topics or the strategic issues that we are intending to solve over the next three workshops that we have.

Thank you.

All right, so I didn't write this, but I get to read it, which is fun. It's sort of a visual thank you to our behavioral health administrator for her wise words here to discuss sort of the upstream or the preventative. It helps frame it for folks who are struggling to understand how we're going to be more strategic. We're envisioning a group of county employees who are walking along the tricky river. Suddenly, we see a person struggling in the water, so somebody jumps in to save the person. Another person floats by in the current that's also clearly distressed. Another rescue is underway, and then another and another, all pulled by the current and clearly needing assistance. The team continues their rescue efforts until we're all exhausted, struggling to keep up with the need. Then someone suggests, let's send part of the team upstream to see what we can do to help keep people out of the river. That's the idea. rather than continuing to plug people out the river. We're looking to be more preventative, and that's really the theme for today. So thank you for indulging us in that. And with it, I'm going to kick us off. We have a team of four people here. One of them is on her way, or... probably got tied up doing something. But I do want to introduce the four individuals that are going to talk a little bit more about this subject. We've got Medical Examiner Dr. Laura Knight, who will be with us at some point, hopefully. We have our new Assistant County Manager, Ryan Gustafson, who comes to us to discuss some things around human services. Assistant Sheriff Ryan Johnston, newer to his role, so we welcome him to the team. And then, of course, our familiar face, Chief Judge Egan Walker, from the Second Judicial District Court, who will also help us. So with that, I'm going to kick it over to Ryan if we can. Dr. Knight was going to talk about some data, but if, Ryan, you could transition us in, that would be great to start.

Not working. There we go.

Thank you, Manager Thomas, Madam Chair, Commissioners. Oh, Dr. Knight is here. We'll take a quick timeout so she can settle in.

Look at this big welcome to Dr. Knight. No, it's fine. It's fine. No worries.

Cam, do you have the clicker? Or you have it, Ryan?

Okay, good. Thank you.

No, you're good. I can get it?

Well, good morning. Right now. I can Get to my slide. There we go. Yeah, so we just wanted to start a little bit with some data from mortality at the medical examiner's office. And this is really just, you know, background information to help you with decision making. And all of the data that I'm presenting right now is Washoe County only. As you know, we cover 19 counties, but I'm focused just on Washoe County in these slides. So the blue line that you can see there on top represents the overall drug-related deaths in Washoe County, which rose steadily over several years. We saw that long trend and then peaked in 2023 for what we hope will be the all-time peak ever for Washoe County and will continue to decline. So you can see that in the second line there, the orange line, fentanyl is the major driver. of the peak that we saw and the increasing trend that we have been seeing pretty much from about 2019 onward. And while the total drug-related deaths that we're seeing here have not returned to the pre-fentanyl era baseline that we had, we have seen a significant reduction since that peak. And I think that that is not a statistical anomaly. And I think that's real.

It's very real.

And it's multifactorial. Everyone asks about this and wants to know why, why. And I don't have all the answers. I have a lot of data, but I don't always have all the answers. I think it's very much multifactorial. I think it's all of the programs in the community. I think it's law enforcement efforts at reducing the availability of these drugs in our community, all the way up to the federal policies and how much drug is available in the whole country. So it's wide ranging and I can't give a full answer. This next graph trends total drug-related deaths in Washoe County alongside fentanyl-related deaths, which again is the orange line still, and the methamphetamine-related deaths, which is the green line. This visual just demonstrates that while illicit fentanyl is certainly a scourge in our community, methamphetamine has been a critical component the whole way along. And I would say that's the, you know, I've been here 11 years. I've seen that trend that methamphetamine is the drug of choice, if you will, in our community, even though fentanyl has also come in. And of note, of course, many drug-related deaths that we see involve more than one substance. And so frequently when fentanyl is present, methamphetamine is also present. And I think you all know that when people are buying methamphetamine, they don't know what's in it. And the same if they think they're buying fentanyl, they don't know what's in it. And often they're a mixture or they're using them together. And then last slide for me, this is a little bit more granular. This is by quarter broken down into two quarter segments. So each point on here is two quarters, like quarter one and quarter two over here. It's just to give you a little bit more of a granular picture of how that decreasing trend is going and that we're seeing kind of that leveling off there in the orange line, but not so much. in the blue line. I think it introduces more noise in the signal, but it also tells a story here that stimulants, methamphetamine, and to a lesser degree, cocaine were on the rise in 2025. So it's just something to be aware of that while fentanyl is still down with only a slightly visible rebound up, the stimulants are becoming popular and cocaine is seeing a resurgence in our community, unfortunately. So that's what I have. I'll take any questions if we're doing that, and I'll hand it over.

Thank you, Dr. Knight. And does anyone have any questions? Commissioner Hill.

Thank you, Madam Chair. What is the national trend? Because I know you interface with a lot of medical examiners across the country. I'd like to hear where we fall with that.

Yeah, great question. The national trend is that opioids are on the decline. We've been a little slower to, you know, it's been very dramatic on the East Coast, but also the rise was much more dramatic and earlier on the East Coast than it was here. You know, I came here from from New York and we were seeing back then it was fentanyl and heroin mixed together, fentanyl laced heroin, you know, back 15 years ago there. And so. That didn't come here until fairly recently. Fentanyl didn't come here. So I think our trend is lagging behind, which is normal. It's typical that drug trends that I've observed during my career kind of start east and move to the west. So while we're seeing a reduction, they're seeing more of a reduction and more dramatic reduction in fentanyl. Otherwise, methamphetamine has never been as popular over like on the East Coast as it is out here, West Coast. It's somewhat popular in the Midwest for several reasons. But methamphetamine, the trend definitely is different here than some of the rest of the country. It's still very high here.

Is it because of a lot of shift work and folks working a lot of different jobs? Yes. here? Because that's what I had heard when people were talking about meth use in the West Coast, but I don't know if that's...

It's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it can be used for productivity. I haven't seen that in my case work in terms of our investigation of deaths. I mean, addiction is a very multifactorial thing, and people are addicted, and they may state that as a reason, but it comes back to the substance abuse and all of the encompassing factors with that.

Okay, thank you. Vice chair Garcia.

Thank you. It seems like it was just a couple years ago, a few years ago that we had an alarming rate of youth who were overdosing in the school district and it just seemed to be in the news constantly. Do you have an update on how that segment of the population is doing in terms of overdose and death?

Yeah, that's a great question. As far as death, I don't think that they're overrepresented in our population. I do think they have been traditionally overrepresented in the survived overdose realm. And that's not data that we have, but that's data that like OD2A produces about people who go to ERs, for example, for overdoses. But we just got our forensic epidemiologist started this month. and we'll be producing much more granular data with some demographics on drug-related deaths that will be in our next annual report, hopefully, and some special reporting that we're doing on drug-related deaths. So we'll make sure that you get copies of those because I'm sure you'll be interested.

And then one follow-up, and maybe it's for Mr. Gustafson. So when we interact with many of the clients who are interacting with the county, crossroads, women's, men's programs, alcohol rises to the top in a lot of their stories. And while they're not dying at as high of rates due to alcohol, is alcohol still, from your purview, a major concern with the clients that we're serving?

Ryan Gustafson for the record I would say yes I think oftentimes what we see is co-occurring substance use whereas alcohol mixed with you know whatever the drug of choice happens to be on top of alcohol but I would say alcohol is still pretty significant just due to the accessibility of it and other factors.

Agreed. Any other questions Commissioner Clark?

Thank you Madam Chair I've got a question about We have an idea where these drugs are coming from. Obviously, I don't think we have any cocoa plants around here for cocaine production, but is it primarily coming from California and West Coast coming here, and the same with the methamphetamine? Is that being produced here locally, or is that coming in from... from other parts of the country. And either of you can answer that question from both of your perspectives, what you guess.

Sure, thank you.

I don't know if this is on predominantly Mexico. It's coming in from Mexico and then it's hitting I-80 being one of the biggest corridors in the United States. So it comes across from Mexico up through California. And what we say in law enforcement is If a car is going east, it's carrying narcotics. If it's going west, it's carrying money and firearms. And that would be across the board as far as the narcotic transportation. And we do, like we will obviously catch them, you know, narcotics coming west, but predominantly it's everything from the west coast coming on through.

So I see the sheriff's vehicles parked on 80 on a regular basis. Are they looking for license plates or they've got intelligence that says that something's coming this way or just luck of the draw? How does that?

It's truly the gambit in Haida, which is our high-intensity drug trafficking area. We've had, as far as from the sheriff's office, we've had like the number one guy in the nation. You know, over the last, you know, over the last decade, we're, we're top in our region. And it's from, I would say, both the experience, the program that we run historically, that training that as far as our succession planning that goes on to through our dogs, through our collaboration, both. within the state, but also nationally to include the LPRs, which are the license plate readers. We now, as far as like our analysts in our Arctic, the analysts that we have for Haida, all collaboration on cases. So we might have, you know, you might have a simple traffic stop that's happening, you know, developed from a patrol, that investigation, that information is being sent to the analyst. The analysts are looking up to it and seeing, you know, looking into it and seeing if there's, you know, a different nexus with people and or narcotics and or money, firearms, and that's being pushed to the head of teams. And then, like what we say, we try to get as far as the boots on the ground as nothing's better than putting a car on the curb, putting a car on the curb.

Is there anything else that the county can help you with, any other tools that the Sheriff's Department needs? And keeping in mind, these folks, all this stuff isn't coming right here to the Nevada border and stopping. It's continuing on all the way across to Chicago or wherever I-80 terminates. But is there anything else that we can do as a county to help your department? intercept some more of this on its way to wherever it may be going.

If I was going to push anything right now currently, it would be one of the sheriff's pillars is pillar three, leveraging technology. I can tell you the amount of information coming from LPRs and like the flock cameras is invaluable. Just those individual data points, us being able to be informed on who's on our roads, which way they're going, what's, it's the technology. The technology is truly going to push us into the next arena. Very good. Thank you.

Any other questions?

I have a follow-up, and so you had brought up, obviously, the technology piece, and I think just in terms of that, not only the technology in terms of the efficiency with staffing and what have you that has a direct correlation to cost savings, but also more importantly is the turnaround time of being able to, I hate to use the term, but catch the bad guys. Literally the turnaround time is exponential. And I thought I'd highlight that point. So I don't know if there's anything you'd like to add, but that's how I see it. So cost savings, staff efficiency, and actually turning around and getting folks where they need to be and stopping their behavior and impacting our communities and others. My bigger question, in light of this workshop being really looking at being proactive versus reactive, and to Dr. Knight, I'd actually ask you, what from a policy perspective can we do to actually help in the endeavors with what we're seeing are downtrends, which is a good thing, but are there other things that we haven't thought of that we might consider?

Well, I mean, my first response earlier in your question, what in terms of policy, you know, is to continue to stay the course, just because we see this little downtrend, you know, not to let up, you know, when the opportunity comes before you for new programs or to continue funding, you know, to continue that. I think that's obvious. But I would pass the buck on new things we haven't thought of to Ryan, really, because I, you know, from my perspective, I see things at the very end when they've gotten to their worst stage. And I think the focus of this workshop is to catch it way earlier than that. And that's unfortunately not the business I'm in. So I don't necessarily see those things, but I bet Ryan does every day.

I don't know if you'd like to add anything, Mr. Gustafson.

We're actually going to.

There we go. We're actually going to hit some of these things as we go through the upcoming slides.

So we're going to tee you up in a little bit. It's a good segue maybe. I'm just, I also don't want to, you know, neglect if there's anything to my same question that you feel that we might want to look at from the policy other than to continue to support technology, that we have many factors than just what people think. It's going to be all on Mr. Gustafson. That's how I see it. He's got it. Well, thank you, Dr. Wright. Thank you so much for at least everything that you do besides just this and your staff and the fact that you deal with a lot of pretty heavy things. I think we sometimes don't hear about all the stuff that you're doing, all of the hard work that you're doing. And I just want to let you know, we appreciate it very much.

Thank you. I appreciate that very much.

Anything else? All right. Well, thank you so much. We appreciate it.

I think a big piece of this is a discussion around things that we can engage in that's diversionary. I think that the phrase an ounce of prevention really rings true in a lot of the things that we're doing. And so really, I'm here to have a conversation around what we're doing to improve the lives of community members by guiding and diverting individuals from negative outcomes to something that looks much more positive. And we do have some good news to share with everybody. It's about people, but it's also about cost avoidance and what we're looking at doing in the future so what do we mean by diversion so this this is redirecting individuals away from negative outcomes towards something more positive both for the community as well as the individual ideally prevention and intervention strategies will help the individual in the future as well as saving the county costs and resources in the long run which i think has been a theme in recent months in our discussions So focusing first on children, in 2018, these are just some examples, we first began investing in a clinical team in Washoe County. in order to help families avoid deeper involvement in the child welfare system. And as a result, we've seen a 35% reduction in the number of children in our custody since that time, which is obviously really good news for children and families as keeping kids unified and reunified with their families is certainly key for us. At the same time, it's also allowed us to avoid costs and caseload reduction, eliminating the need for additional child welfare staff, which we see a lot in other states and regions right now. to ongoing caseload growth. So that's something that we have not seen in Washoe County due to a lot of preventative efforts specifically tied to clinical services and other infusionary services that we've plugged in, which are very preventative. You'll also recall the county took over operations of the Children's Mobile Crisis Response Team in July of 2024. And since that time, we've seen a 94% reduction of the kids and families served from hospitalization. So we've been able to keep those families in their homes under a safety plan, working closely with the clinical teams rather than costly emergency room visits. And then I'd also like to highlight the impactful work from our colleagues over at Juvenile Services where the provision of case management and targeted intervention has resulted in 75% of referrals being diverted from the formal court processing, which significantly reduces the workload across the juvenile justice system. And then shifting the focus to housing and support for individuals who are unhoused, we're starting to see significant results from the investments that the county has made. Pointing out a few highlights, county case managers and behavioral health teams have facilitated 827 exits to permanent housing in 2025. And during the same period, the Sheriff's Office HOPE team, which is a critical partner in that effort, has worked towards housing an additional 177 individuals. And we're very excited to recently have cut the ribbon on our PSH program, which is 50 new permanent supportive housing units on the Cares campus. Which is paired with what's called ACT, Assertive Community Treatment, which is an evidence based treatment. aimed to meet the needs of individuals with real significant behavioral health challenges. And so as of today, we have, I want to say, 42 of the 50 units filled, and there's 65 beds across those 50 units. And we're able to see significant costs and resource savings by wrapping services around these individuals, which keeps them off the streets, out of the jail, and out of the hospitals. And then moving on to another set of vulnerable populations, but we can start with seniors. I know the seniors that I speak with, the general theme is that they wanna stay in their home. And it's typically their number one priority when we have these conversations. So we've seen a significant increase in our capacity to keep seniors in our home through our homemaker program. And over the last five years, we've increased the number of services from 181 to 417, which is a real significant increase in our homemaker program, which has been real successful. And then our public guardian team also works diligently with their referrals, exploring appropriate options and alternatives. Approximately 60% of cases end up with a family guardian, while 40% are diverted to a less restrictive alternative, which magnifies savings across departments. What that means is that these folks don't have court cases or ongoing monitoring while still receiving the support and retaining their civil liberties. And then individuals receiving assisted outpatient treatment participate in civil court process led by Judge Liu at the Second Judicial District Court. This court collaborates with state partners where they receive psychiatric services, intensive case management, and many other additional supports. And this has resulted in a 47% decrease in legal hold petitions and a 42% decrease in criminal cases following successful completion. And finally, we can talk about innovative service models that meet clients where they are. As an example, I'd like to share the success of Northern Nevada Public Health's shift to offering walk-in clinic hours. These flexible, accessible access to sexual health care has resulted in a 126% increase in utilization with clients receiving same-day testing and treatment. I'll kick it over to John.

Let me first apologize for how busy this first slide is, but I think it truly demonstrates just how much is happening across the justice system. As we continue to divert individuals with behavioral health challenges from the justice system into behavioral health and social service systems in alignment with this sequential intercept model framework, we start to see a bunch of results. Let's start with our boots on the ground. Our mobile outreach safety team, our clinicians in participation with our patrol units. They're the first to see the individuals. They went on 1187 calls for service last year with only 8% of those calls resorting in transportation to our jail and or emergency rooms. Courts. Our treatment and therapeutic course across the region are making meaningful impact. 432 individuals successfully completing their program, improving lives and protecting the public safety. Providing individuals with access to behavioral health treatment also benefits public safety with a 93% reduction in arrests for individuals who were diverted and housed. That's an incredible number. And finally, I'm incredibly proud of the detention team and the good work that they are doing in the detention facility. Our jail based mental health unit has resulted in a 40% reduction in days spent in custody for participating individuals. The medication assistant treatment program has reduced recidivism by 36%, which is another example of an effective strategy. All of these efforts from the first interaction with patrol and our most team on the streets to the specialty courts and program designed to get people the help they need. And finally making sure that those end up that those who end up with us in detention have the opportunity to work towards wellness. They all help individuals and result in cost avoidance for the county and the other agencies in community. This is truly what it looks like to successfully invest in diversion and help the individuals move forward to a better outcome.

Thank you, Assistant Sheriff Johnson. So where does that lead us? And this is going to wrap up my portion is really what comes next for us and what we have deemed as important is really to stay the course. And what does that look like? It looks like people. We have clinicians, caseworkers, program staff working in human services programs, courts, juvenile justice systems, and the jail. This is where magic certainly happens for us. These team members, both staff and contracted, are essential to working successfully upstream. Housing, our investments in housing of all kinds continue to be a top priority to meet a significant need. The courts, our therapeutic and treatment courts have a long track record of providing meaningful opportunities for clients to improve their lives while also improving public safety. Treatment, apologies in advance for the acronyms. Relatively early in our journey as a county to facilitate direct access to treatment, and the work is already showing impressive results. So what does that look like? It's the Washer County Jail-Based Mental Health Unit, assertive community treatment paired with supportive housing at the CARES campus, medication-assisted treatment at the jail and in the community. multi-systemic therapy for children within the juvenile justice system, and when necessary and appropriate, assisted outpatient therapy for individuals who are under involuntary civil commitment. And let's not forget the direct safety net clinical services offered by Northern Nevada Public Health. And finally, it's our partnerships. The county is leading or participating in multiple collaborative efforts with a long list of partners. We can't be successful on our own. These collaborations are working to strengthen early intervention, enhance behavioral health response and assessment, and expand mental health training and resources. And it seems to be working for us. We're seeing a reduction in the reliance of the juvenile justice and child welfare systems for youth experiencing behavioral health crises. The sequential intercept model initiative and crisis response development along with coalition facilitation and working on multidisciplinary teams are making meaningful steps towards improving outcomes for both children and adults. And it's important that we provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholders and the public to provide input and guidance. I point to the opioid settlement needs assessment and planning process. And Northern Nevada Public Health's Community Needs Assessment and Community Health Improvement Plan is opportunities for the community to engage and for the county to benefit from their wisdom. And with that, I will turn it over to Chief Judge Walker.

So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. If I could have a clicker, Ryan. What's next? So I want to build into two metaphors that you've heard here today. The metaphor of the Truckee River and people drowning on the Truckee River and nets the county manager gave you. What we need to do is keep the same nets we have and move them upstream so that we catch people before they enter the river or much sooner when they're in the river. And what you're seeing is movement from silos to synthesis across the system. The behavioral health center, the sequential intercept model, the jail-based mental health unit, the crisis response team, screening at all levels for all human beings. Housing, you know the number one ask I always come to you guys for is housing across system needs. Treatment and county-based treatment, what a unique concept that is in our careers, Ryan's career and mine. The concept that the county would be a provider of mental health treatment in particular is mind-blowing, right? But it is the kind of change we need to undertake. How lucky am I to get to bat cleanup, by the way, on all of this? And I appreciate that opportunity. Because I'll tell you, I'm remarkably proud to live in Washoe County, right? I'm a California transplant. Don't anybody hate on me. I came to Washoe County in late 1982, so 44 years ago. And I've raised my family here, right? Six kids. My entire career has been in northern Nevada, and the overwhelming majority of it has been in Washoe County. And from before birth until after people die and at every stage in between, there are safety nets in the county. There are services in the county. There are ways that the county strives to meet human beings where they're at with the needs they need addressed at the time they need them addressed. I would suggest to you there are a few other counties in the nation, in my opinion, and I've been to many, many, many counties. through the National Council of Judicial and Family Court judges for many years. I'm very proud to work here. And what you have in abundance, as lean years happen in budgets, but what you have in abundance is people. You have an incredible cadre of people who work in this county. What do I mean by that? I'll tell you a story. If, as a judge, either Judge Liu or I, I get people out of custody. Judge Liu keeps people out of placements, civil placements. But if I get somebody out of jail, there's a deputy sheriff who makes sure that human being has all their meds, all their clothes, has been fed. If they haven't been fed, gets them a meal on the way down to prison. NAMS campus, which is state agency, where there's a warm handoff at NAMS to the establishment of services, and then that deputy sheriff and the NAMS staff take the people over to the CARES campus. You have some amazing, amazing case managers at the CARES campus. So the reason we reduce recidivism in that population of people by 93% is your human capital. It's the people you have working for you. I'd like to propose that you do much more outreach involving us in other agencies in the county and us at higher levels of the county. What's working in the courts isn't Judge Walker, let me assure you. It's the court clerks I work with. It's the cops on the street. It's the public guardian and the public guardian case managers. It's the social workers. It's the investigators in the... in the coroner's office. It is the line people at the school district, the bus drivers, you know, If kids have positive pro-social activities in the park across the street from their house, the guy who's mowing the lawn at the park is a part of this safety net, right? I think there need to be thousands and thousands and thousands of thank you letters to the human capital, because that human capital costs you, of course, in their salaries and fully loaded benefits, but it also pays dividends in ways you just can't describe. Like the savings numbers are hard. As I said in my presentation to you last month, I can't put money back in your bank accounts by saving you money. But what I can guarantee is that as we reduce morbidity and mortality in our community, as we reduce penetration, removal of children from their parents' custody or into juvenile services and ultimately into the prison system, which is where I come in, that saves hundreds of millions of dollars and prevents those needs, those unmet needs in dollars from growing for all of you. So Washoe County works, I would submit to you all. It really works. There is right now a system that you need to continue investing in. We need you not to build new things, but to help us level up those existing investments so that rather than a bigger net, we have a net with smaller apertures, smaller openings, so that fewer people slip through that net and that the net is positioned upstream in a place where it has the best effect for the best cost available. This is the end of our formal presentation, except I would suggest to you that you see lives being saved at every juncture in the county right now. I certainly see it as a judge. And you should celebrate that and be very proud of that and lean into thanking staff. One of my personal goals around the courthouse is to go to the human beings who do all the work. If you tell my judge colleagues I said this, I'll deny it. But what makes the courthouse work is not the 16 district judges. It's the 200 employees behind them that keep the system working, that make the paperwork work. And I know the sheriff's command staff leans into that hard. If you don't know the detention services deputies of the sheriff's department, if you don't know the line social workers, you should. because they are remarkable professionals. I welcome any questions. That's our formal presentation.

Thank you so much. I'll open it up to questions at this time. Anybody have any questions? Commissioner Hill.

I'm really excited because I think this shows that we have a commitment to making sure that when we're investing in these services that we actually have real outcomes that we can celebrate. And these investments can show the community that when we invest in people, they have opportunity in our communities. Um, I'm curious and I hate to be negative because it is also positive. What is not working? I mean, I know that we don't have enough permanent supportive housing. I know we don't have enough treatment options in the community and that can be tough. Um, And so just like so the board has an understanding of what we can control, what we can't control. And I understand that today like you want the direction of are we going to stay the course or are we happy with where we're at? And what would it look like if we had some more resources and the things that are not helping us achieve these goals?

Thank you for the question. There are things that are not working yet. We recognize areas that need improvement such as The caseworkers that will follow somebody once they're housed to make sure that they stay housed, for example. Rather than, because we know where we are financially, rather than adding staff to do that, it's a matter of when we can make reductions in the number of people that are being sheltered at the CARES campus, for example. Do we shift some of those caseworkers that are there or reassign the numbers that are assigned to each caseworker? a little differently so that we can provide those services in the community to those individuals that are housed so we can keep them housed, things like that. It's not that it's not working, and I'm not saying we do everything perfect by any sense of the imagination, but what I'm saying is you've got a staff that is committed to seeking to do things and improving every time we look at that aren't working so that would be one of the areas. Housing of course and it's not the county's responsibility only. We took as you know the lead on homeless services which is really emergency shelter and some of the lower spectrum housing offerings such as emergency shelter and permanent supportive housing but we continue to implore our fellow city representatives to continue along the path that they agreed which is to focus on housing resources for the community because this whole trajectory only works as long as we have housing to place people into to have those caseworkers help keep them there, things like that. So I don't know if my colleagues have other things that are not working or that we could continue to focus on.

I have a couple of things I think that I could add and I'll try to not soapbox on this too much, but we did, our foster care population was decimated post COVID and we lost 53% of our foster care providers. We've gotten about 5% of that back. And so what we've seen because of that is kids lingering in shelters and, um, inappropriate levels of care, occasionally too high of a level of care, which there's a whole DOJ lawsuit going on around that, and occasionally too low of a level of care where a kid needs enhanced or increased treatment and that kiddo's not able to get that. And so where that trickles to is because we don't necessarily have that service array in town as it puts an increased pressure on the foster care community to work with kids when there's not necessarily the resources in place for that. So I would say looking at not just the foster care community, but also the mental and behavioral health resources that this community has to offer. As you know, we did purchase a shuttered hospital to help address that. So we're real excited about what that's going to look like for us next year because we need beds in this community for kids who need mental and behavioral health services, whether that be residential treatment to stabilization. to something that might look like an intensive outpatient or outpatient or even assessment services or services to keep kids safe when they're being trafficked. So we're trying to be proactive in that and addressing that as a community as well. So I think that you can really cross the age spectrum and see things that we could do more of. We have a wait list for homemakers. There's, you know, for as many additional folks that we, seniors that we have served, there's still some that are in the queue that would like to be able to age in their homes and get those services. And so I think there's more that we can do. I think Chief Judge is right in that, you know, really the people are the key resource for us. And we have some very dedicated people whose life's work is tied into making this community a better place.

That's great. And I would say on the housing piece, so I'm hearing, you know, we need more foster families, but they need resources once the kids are in their home. And I know how that is. And so does Commissioner Garcia intimately finding even a speech pathologist. I'm on a waiting list for months and I have a daughter who's delayed in speech. That's unacceptable. But anyway, so, and then casework, transitioning to housing, that makes total sense. We just need more support on that and the mental and behavioral health resources in the community. And I'd like to know more specifically what, like where the gaps are, but we can probably have that conversation later. But I was just wondering on, or I just want to commend our homeless team for On housing, we have on average over 68 people a month that y'all have housed. And we are the only part of the state that has grown in workforce and affordable housing instead of reduced our units. So I do commend Sparks and Reno because I think they're trying as much as they can with the resources they have. Because there's no way you could... We were at 30 people a month. So I'm assuming you have more resources to get people housed. How did we double the housing from the CARES campus? Because that's something I didn't even know about. That's amazing.

I mean that's a great question I think it's a concerted effort across programs you know I think between the homeless outreach teams to again getting PSH onboarded and working with some partners you see another building getting stood up on that campus which is going to have additional units so I think it's It's being good partners with providers in the community, with housing providers in the community, figuring out where the volume is, where the available units are, and leveraging that as expeditiously and efficiently as we possibly can.

Madam Chair, can I weigh in? Of course. So a series of statistics I'll give you, Commissioner Hill, that will help about where you put those nets that you already have. So the statistics you saw out of juvenile services, when you look at those combined with statistics out of human services agency, keep this in mind. If you remove a child from their family of origin, you remove a child from the care custody and control of mom or dad or mom and dad, and they end up in the foster care system, or you remove a child into the child delinquency system, either one, you make it four to seven times more likely that child's gonna end up in prison as an adult. Those are just hard statistics. And so those numbers, those remarkable numbers from juvenile services and from human services are where the money is. And I would suggest to you, one way to avoid needing beds is to avoid removals of children, right? One of the genius things that Ryan and his predecessors have done at human services is wrap services around families much earlier so that we're not removing those kids from mom and dad. The truth of the matter is kids do better with mom and dad, even if mom and dad have significant challenges than not. There are some remarkable foster families, don't get me wrong, and foster to adoption is a remarkably wonderful thing that works for kids. But outside of that, kids do better in their families of origin. And so that's what I mean by those upstream nets. Like, we have a remarkable... juvenile probation department. It's an, it's an incredible, it's a nation leading department in my opinion. And that's where to keep putting your dollars so that those nets reduce the number of children you have to place. And as you of course work to increase the beds, it has an additive effect. Sorry, I hope that's useful.

Thank you. I would just add, spending 10 years with foster children, I think I used to always share with people that even though the situation from the outside looking in is really heart-wrenching, those children, that's what they know, and that's the family they love. And that is a tie that you can't replicate anywhere. And so to your point, Chief Judge Walker and Mr. Gustafson, like keeping them in with the folks they love and then looking at how that wraparound services has an exponential effect that have already been shared. So I hear you. I think we all hear you.

Could I just drive that point home here? When I came to the county in 2017, we were removing nearly 1,000 children a year from their homes. Last fiscal year, our number was about 300.

Well, in 2015, I watched the... All of a sudden I drew a blank where they used to actually go when they were moved before going directly to foster. Kids cottage, thanks.

I can't believe that I forgot the kids cottage.

How many years have I spent at the kids cottage? And that was packed, sometimes overflowing. The capacity at that kids' cottage went from overflowing to almost negligible to the point that's all been made. So I think it's a really great thing for you to share on where those resources need to be. Are there any other questions? I have a question as well, but go ahead, Vice Chair, please.

This is such a great conversation. Thank you for everybody that's contributing. I really like the slide that has the continuum, people, housing, courts, treatment partners, and it's clear that there's a lot of systemic issues that we're up against in the state of Nevada. You know, for people, we are still battling a shortage of mental health providers, not only recruiting and training them, but keeping them, and these are very tough I mean, even from the street-level case manager all the way up to a highly certified, trained clinician. That's a big area that keeps me up at night, actually, because we can provide the best ecosystem for things to work, but if we don't have those key personnel to drive those outcomes home, that's an area that I still continue to worry about and I know we have some training space you know in our new facility and I'm excited to hear about those efforts but we're really going to need to rely on our regional partners to help us with that because the county can't do it all obviously. My question is more about how do we frame this to our constituents you know an easy metric or thing that we can draw upon when we're talking about the power of being proactive versus reactive is I often refer to how much it costs to jail an inmate, an actual daily cost per inmate. Sulphurina was just here in December saying full services range between $500 and $800 a day. But where else in our services can we show something that will resonate with our constituents that you know whether it's on the youth side or the substance abuse treatment side I feel like and we don't need to answer this today but I think we just at the end of the day need to be better storytellers and quantify how we can show that outcomes not only relying on the jail metric that we often lean upon but showing how this youth and maybe it's tied to high school graduation rates. I'm not sure how we can frame it, but I'd really implore our staff to look at different ways so that we, when we're talking to our constituents at the grocery store, you can just pull something very quickly that will be meaningful and really concrete.

Really quick, if I might, as we move into this shift in mindset and approach, with that comes the need to define metrics and collect data so that we can articulate that story. And I think you're exactly right. I hear it from almost every one of you up here when I meet with you frequently about quantifying and being able to tell the community when we say it's working, being able to tell them how much or what dollar number or how many hours saved or whatever. So yeah, we agree.

So I know you didn't tee that up, but that's kind of my last point here. And that is that I think the collaborations of, to Vice Chair's point about not having Washoe County be dependent on doing it all, is something that we all would agree. But I do want to just add that I think a good partnership that just has recently been put into place is the veteran service officers. And the fact that not only are those veteran service officers, which there's a whomping two, We're the only county in the entire state of Nevada that has that partnership, and they literally go, I believe it's two days a week to, they're at the senior center, and then the other two days they alternate over at the CARES campus. We're talking literally about from January 12th through the end of February, equated to over $300,000 in identified benefits for those eligible veterans that may or may not have even realized they were eligible. And so that's just the beginning of it. And I think that helps not only veterans, Is it helping in terms of just the immediate need, but it's also helping long-term? Because one of the VSO officers had shared with me a story about the CARES campus, and literally within understanding what those benefits were available to him, then set him up in, and I'll use the term, a permanent housing situation. and then pull that resource from the CARES campus to actually a productive life, if you will, and other things that were beneficial for that individual. That's just one story. There's probably a lot more. But the fact is that it also serves seniors. And so I'm just going to use Ryan Gustafson as an example. 427 seniors were served. at the CARES campus, and 51 of those were veterans. So that's just an example, that's just one example. So multiply that times a year, times another year, times another year, and to Chief Justice's point, imagine what that net looks like, because now we've closed those net loops, right? We're closing those net loops. So I just wanted to share that. I also have a question, Mr. Gustin. I know there's a lot of information that seems to be circulating about the CARES campus and all of the costs that are related to us essentially helping those that are out of state with numbers that are not accurate. And I wondered if you would be so kind to kind of share a little bit about that.

Yeah, I appreciate the question, Chair. Yeah, we have been doing a much deeper dive in recent months to take a look at what are the numbers looking like for folks that are coming in. And we're doing it on a quarterly basis. And so just to provide you some clarification, so in the last quarter, we had about 600 folks that were sort of new participants coming into our programs. And Of that, about 15, a little over 15% of those were coming from out of Washoe County. So the vast majority of the individuals that were being served are actually county folks. So about 100 of those folks were coming from out of county. Most of those were still coming from within Nevada, the state, coming from the local counties. A big chunk of that 100 were coming from Las Vegas and then of the out-of-state, the biggest chunk were coming from California. But that was just based on the small percentage of between 15 and 16% that were coming from out-of-community. So just to be clear, most of the folks that we are serving, the CARES camps, about 85% of them are Washoe County folks.

And then I'll just add, I was writing down before some of you guys were using the terms, but I feel like we should call ourselves Washoe County Silo Busters. We are the Silo Busters, and we certainly can thank Sim for a major part of that. I think in terms of continuing to stay the course, which is part of what we're looking at, I think everybody, unless there's something that someone feels differently, I think that is echoed. And looking at resources, looking at technology, looking at how to be more efficient, And hopefully if we do a really good job, maybe the numbers will continue to go down. That we'll see, right? And then we can look at how we can, again, be proactive versus reactive and how we can actually tell the story. So as an example, kudos to the Human Services Agency for doing a newsletter. It just went out in April. And those newsletters have all the stats and more. about a lot of the information that mr gustafson shared but i think that the county is committed to actually sharing facts and the information then that way people can look at that information if they have suggestions it's always welcome but if anybody wants to sign up to that newsletter they can they can do so Commissioner Clark, you had your hand raised.

I have a question for Mr. Gustafson on cost per day per individual at the CARES campus. How much is cost per day?

I can get it to you to the penny. Give me a second to do that. I believe it's around $71 a day. Okay, great. Thanks.

Compared to jail. And I don't have that number set.

I wasn't comparing it to jail. I was comparing it to the 100 people that are here from other parts of the state. No, I know.

I just thought that was an interesting stat that the vice chair had shared. I wasn't sharing that. You said that.

You can't get a motel. In town for that amount because you're going to have to pay room tax on top of it.

Good point.

Yeah. I mean, it's pretty incredible what our team is doing with so few resources.

Anything else? from anyone? So thank you so much for all the information. Thanks for the staff for putting this all together. And I think we do have to say a million thank yous to all the staff that we don't see every day that are doing all the heavy lifting. And you can never say thank you enough, ever, in my opinion, ever. So a million thank yous to everyone. We are gonna take a 10 minute break, so it's 10.05, we'll come back at 10.15, thank you. We're going to go ahead and call the meeting back into order at 1015. Thank you. Manager Thomas, please.

Thank you very much. So we heard a lot this morning about diversion of service in the realm of public or rather human service. And we're going to shift a little bit as we know this entire organization does work that is well outside of the human service realm. It is a significant cost when we look at what we do, whether it's using staff as folks doing the work or focusing on the community as the recipient of the work. We also have lots of infrastructure things and so forth. So that's coming in our next workshop. But we are going to talk a little bit next about public education as a service diversion strategy. Part of what we wanted to achieve with these workshops is to highlight various departments that we typically don't hear from in these forums. We're looking forward to hearing from them. I'm going to kick it over to Assistant Manager Solero, though, to tee us off on this section.

All right. Good morning, everybody. So today we are going to talk about public education as a diversion strategy and some of the successful things that some of our departments are doing to really change the narrative on when we provide services and how we let our community provide their own service. So with us today is Cheyenne Shull, Regional Animal Services Director. We have our Public Administrator, Nicole Klitschke. and our public guardian, Tracy Bowles. So some people you don't normally see from, as the manager mentioned. So again, today as we focus on education and some examples of thinking in different ways to provide services today that will lessen the need to provide services in the future. That's really what we're trying to accomplish. So many of our departments work proactively to anticipate the needs of our citizens related to services provided, which actually lessens the bureaucracy of government. However, that is not enough in this day and age. As citizens of the county, we make decisions in our daily lives, but sometimes do not know the simple things that we can do today to help us in the future or our heirs and relatives in the future. Really trying to put government in less of a backstop position. So it's interesting when we look at the slide and the concepts of knowledge being power, The Envision Washoe 2040 master plan that was adopted by Washoe County has a whole section where we got feedback from our community. And part of the feedback that we got from our community was that the citizens want to be resilient. And so when you look at that section and the definition of what resiliency means to them, phrases like overcoming challenges, adapt and recover, multifaceted strength, ensuring longevity, all of that we can assist them with by providing education to them so that they can be empowered to make their own decisions, good decisions, to help themselves out in the future, so that we don't then have to come back and provide services to them, you know, strangers actually providing services to them, right? And really, it helps our departments focus on those core missions that they do to really, to help those that really need it while taking out the people that can do the things themselves, the things that we've heard from them, they want to do themselves. They want to be resilient. They want to provide for their families. They want to do these things. You know, we see it all the time. Someone comes in and they want to do something. They just don't know where to start. And so part of that is education and education with our community members. And so with that, I'm going to hand it over to Cheyenne to talk about some things animal service is doing, some super cool things.

Good morning, Cheyenne for the record. It's my pleasure to be here to talk to everyone about some of the principles that animal services has implemented into our department over the years that help us with not only education but being proactive because as I think a theme has already been sort of set this morning that we can't build enough spaces for all of the needs in our community, the same applies to our animal shelter. We can't build a bigger shelter. We can't continue to hire more staff to impound more animals. And so how can we work more efficiently and smarter with the resources that we have? And how can we educate our community to help us? So today I'll walk you through some successful areas that we've been proactively putting in place over the years. Many of our services are proactive. We work on a lot of different things that help divert animals from coming into our shelters, such as spay and neuter, affordable vaccines. So much of our work is really geared towards education and proactivity. But today I'm really gonna focus on lost and found animals because that is what I can share tangible results with you all. And if we think about the fact in our industry, It is scientifically proven that one in three pets will become lost in their lifetime. That's empowering data for our community to know and to understand because I think a lot of people think it'll never happen to me. My cat lives inside. I don't need to put an identification on my cat. I don't need to vaccinate my cat. I don't need to worry about my cat coming into contact with bats, so I don't need to vaccinate them for rabies. These are all false. You never know what can happen, and so it's really kind of incumbent on us to help our community understand what are the risks, how can they help us, and what can we do to provide those tools and resources to the community to be proactive. I would like to challenge you all. And I know everyone in this room probably has seen or heard, or even remembers the antiquated dog catcher term. I despise it so much dog pound. I despise that word so much. Um, we have worked really hard in this industry over the last 20 years to transition ourselves from that dog catcher to animal services officer. animal shelter or animal resource center. And that is exactly what we are. Our animal services officers are out in the community as professionals as resource providers, and to engage with our community. We don't want to take your dog or your cat. We want that animal to be at home where they belong. And so how can we provide an empower our community to keep them there is really what we're focused on doing when we're out there in the community. So what does that look like in practice? We are working on proactive programs that help support our lost and found services through actionable programs and steps. We are equipping our community with tools and resources, tips to prevent pets from escaping. So oftentimes when my officers respond to a call for a loose animal, it is not that the pet owner is irresponsible or neglecting their pet. It's that they just maybe don't necessarily have the resources or the knowledge to keep their pet contained. Many people don't know that if your pet is not spayed and neutered, your pet is more likely to roam. to dig a hole under your fence, to climb over your fence, to chew a board to get out of your yard. So this is information that's common knowledge to my staff that we share with the community to help them understand the easy steps that they can take to keep those pets contained. practical knowledge such as securing fences, gates, kids go to school and leave gates open when school starts in the fall or late summer, we see an uptick in loose animals and it's because when the kids are off to school they don't necessarily realize that I left the gate open or the front door open and Fido's following me to school now. So these are easy tips that we provide to our community. Having photos of your pets, current photos, simple tools, tips that can help get pets reunited if they become separated. And having those photos accessible in your phone. I tell people a really quick, easy step to help get your pet reunified is create a contact in your phone with your pet's photo, their microchip number, and any other identifying information so that you have that information accessible. If you lose your pet, it's a traumatic experience and you're not necessarily thinking clearly. And then clear tools and resources on our website, as well as information that we relay to the community, our public-facing staff, dispatchers, front office staff, about what to do if you lose a pet and what to do if you found a pet. So it's easier for the community to be self-serving and to file that loss report, to put that photo of their pet onto our website, and for us to hopefully be able to reunite them with their lost pet. The goal is for the shelter to not be the location that every lost pet has to go to. Animals don't belong in a system. They belong at home with their families. So now I'll share with you a few of our programs that we have implemented that have also worked with, have been successful with education and proactivity. With regards to getting pets back home, free microchips have been in place in our community since 2011, since our Board of County Commission at that time approved our free program. We have microchipped just under 40,000 dogs and cats since 2011. In the last five years, we've microchipped 11,667 dogs and cats. And within those same years, we've been able to return just over 9,600 dogs and cats by way of microchip. So this program is a self-seller, I will call it, but we still do have to convince people. Some people think there's a tracker in the microchip. It's a tool that helps us. It's a permanent identification tool that gives us information for the owner so we can get that pet back home. External ID is equally important as that permanent microchip that we implant into dogs and cats and horses and tortoises and goats and all kinds of animals. It helps us get those animals back home easier. A good Samaritan doesn't have a microchip scanner in their back pocket. And so if your pet has external ID, hopefully we can empower the community to reunite that pet without contacting animal services. We have a tag engraver at the shelter that we obtained through a grant. We can make personal pet ID tags for dogs and cats for free for any Washoe County resident. And then again, I'm mentioning that self-serving lost and found reporting system, making it simple, making it easy for people to report their pet if it's been lost and also for a good Samaritan, what to do if they found a pet and it isn't necessarily to contact Washoe County right away. We have lots of statistics that prove that pets don't wander more than a half a mile from home in general. So keeping a pet in the neighborhood and walking door to door, talking to people, to see if they know who the pet owner is, is often very beneficial. In addition to our licensing, we have a requirement. In addition to that, we have a lost and found hotline. And so within our licenses, if your dog is wearing a tag, on the back of that tag, there is a phone number to contact that hotline that the lost and found service provides information for the owner So if someone finds a pet, they can contact the person and hopefully get that animal reunited. And since we joined our current vendor, DocuPet, for licensing, we have averaged approximately 200 pets per year. that never came into the shelter that were directly reunited out in the field by way of that tag. And that's just that particular segment of the lost animal population, not including all of the other ways that our community is reuniting pets. And I almost failed to mention that we have 20 free self-serving microchip scanning stations throughout Washoe County so every pet station store has a scanning station every Truckee Meadows fire station has a scanning station and options veterinary care has a microchip scanning station these stations are set up to be self-serving so if an individual finds a dog or a cat they can bring them in scan the pet and there are prompts to give them direction on how to contact the company so that we can put them in touch with their owner. And unfortunately, there's not really a tangible way to wrap our arms around how many of these pets get reunified because there's not a way to track that. So we don't necessarily know how successful it is until we hear from our partners that we were able to reunify a cat or a dog today. And lastly, the tangible results of the proactive programs that we've put into place and the education that we help our community with is really in the numbers. And a lot of things can be attributed to the shelter diversion, but for sure and for certain, we know that our community has grown in the last five years. Our community human population as well as our pet population has grown. We were estimated at about 251,000 dogs and cats in 2021. and today we're estimated at 266,000 dogs and cats in our community. And so as one might expect, you would anticipate higher calls for service, more needs for animals to be sheltered, I am happy to report that for the calls for service, yes, we're seeing more of those, but we're seeing less animals coming into our shelter. And we have to be able to attribute that to some of the empowerment that we've given our community to reunite pets and not bring them to animal services. We've seen a 13.5% decline in animals coming into the shelter. The result is that we obviously had a savings in resources by not impounding and sheltering animals, caring for those animals until they could either be adopted or returned back to their owner. But we also empowered the communities to be self-sufficient. And that dollar amount up there is a conservative estimate of $176,000 estimate of savings by those animals that were diverted from the shelter. But we generally would see a higher savings by animals that were returned in the field and never came into the shelter by way of microchip or identification. So in closing, when we lead with education, we're not just solving today's problem. we're preventing tomorrows. By educating our community with the tools and the knowledge they need, we create a lasting impact, stronger partnerships, and better outcomes for people and pets in our community. I'll hand it over to Nicole.

For the record, so I'm the Washoe County Public Administrator, and our role here today isn't so much to talk about what we've done for education, but what we can do in the future. So in 2025, the Public Administrator's Office received over 340 referrals. Only 52 of those had estate plans in place, allowing us to identify the qualified individual chosen by the decedent to administer their final affairs and turn that jurisdiction over to them. In 2026, we've received 116 referrals and only 17 of those have had estate plans in place. When there's an estate plan in place, it allows us to turn it over to the person the decedent wanted to do their affairs and lessens the burden on our office. Educating the public on wills and trusts could reduce preventable cases, streamlines the ones we do handle, and ensure our resources are focused on residents who truly have no one else to act on their behalf. Even when the office must step in in matters that have estate planning in place, there are benefits such as making assets easier to locate, beneficiaries are clearly defined, and less time spent on the investigations. Public Administrator's Office can provide practical advice to our constituents, such as what to do with that will or trust when you have it in place, how to store it, make it easier for us to find, make it easier for your loved ones to find, to avoid unnecessary delays. We can also provide cautionary tales. and let people know exactly what's gonna happen if you don't have a plan in place and how important it is to have a plan in place. However, our office cannot provide legal advice, so what we can do moving forward in the future is perhaps partner with other departments such as adult senior services or even public guardian, lawyer in the library and those types of programs to try to get this very important message out to constituents. I think that covers it. I know ours was short, so I'm going to turn it over to Tracy.

All right, good morning. I'm Tracy Bowles. I'm the public guardian. And I think that you'll see a theme that kind of runs through these services. We're talking about pets in our community that need planning and education. We have adults in our community that need planning and education for their future. And much like the medical examiner this morning, I'm kind of at the end of that as well as the public guardian, as is Nicole. But like many of our people serving departments in Washoe County, we're seeing some similar trends. Our caseloads are rising. Our staff is not. And so we have to be more proactive to continue to do the amazing work that we do at Washoe County and utilize different skills and tools and be able to do that. And we find education is one of those things that's really helpful to get the word out about guardianship, to get the word out about estate planning, to get the word out about planning for your pets. One of the things that we... I guess I'll advance your slide so you can see that. One of the things that we see in guardianship is that guardianship is so very misunderstood. Most people get referred to guardianship by a banker or a doctor. And frankly, they don't know a whole lot about guardianship. They might see it as a tool to access an account or a way to get a medical consent signed. But guardianship is far more involved than that. It's a restriction of a person's civil liberties and their constitutional rights. And so rather than looking at it as a tool to get something accomplished for an institution or a system, we have to look at that as a tool to protect or support an individual. And it should only be used if there's no other option that's available. It's really the end of the line. We want to make sure that people understand that this can be a complex legal process. It can also be a costly legal process if you have a family that doesn't agree, because there can be litigation that's involved. It doesn't solve all problems in our community. It doesn't fill resource gaps that we have in our community. But oftentimes, people are looking to guardianship to actually do that. And we know that if we can get out there and get in advance of some of these things, we know that we can provide the education that's needed so that we can both reduce the referrals that are coming into our office, but are also giving people in our community options for themselves, that they can solve their own problems, that they can retain their rights, that they can have the family members that they want to be involved continue to be involved in their lives. So diverting from guardianship and preventing unnecessary guardianship, one of the themes of our education that we really focus on is we want people to understand what guardianship really is. We want people to understand that guardianship is a process that can limit a person's individual rights and their individual liberties. And it's also a process that is put in place for decision making. That's pretty much what guardianship is. It puts another person in the shoes of the individual to make those decisions. Helping community partners understand that is Sometimes at the back end, what community members are often looking for in systems and organizations, they're looking to solve specific problems. And so while guardianship is one of those tools that can be used, it certainly is not a panacea to solve all of the problems that exist. We like to educate people about what capacity looks like and what limited capacity looks like. And I'm going to give you an example of that that we did with a family quite recently that helps really illustrate that. We want to talk about least restrictive alternatives. A lot of people jump to guardianship as the first option. Well, maybe we should get them a guardian. But there are so many other options. And we continue across this nation to grow our options before getting a guardian, which is really important. The state of Nevada has done some really great work in terms of putting codifying supported decision making into law. That's not something every state in this union has. We have done some great work with having a Nevada lockbox, where you can file your powers of attorney and your guardianship nominations. And they can be accessible to medical providers in our community. And so getting the information out there about what are those tools that you can use before we get to a guardian is, even though that's not the work that we are here to do as the public guardian, we think it's really important to do that work because it really helps empower our community members and it helps get people to the right tools that they need at the right time in their lives. We think that it's really important for people to understand the limitations of guardianship Guardianship is even if we are put in place to help make decisions, we can't prevent people from making poor decisions in their lives. We're not with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And sometimes that's what families are worried about too, that they may not want to be their person's guardian because they don't want to control their person and they don't think they can control their person. And so part of our education is explaining that we can't either. That's not what we're here to do. Sometimes people are going to make bad decisions. But there are services and supports that if we can guide those people to get to, that might help improve their ability to make better decisions in their lives. We also feel like there is a really big bang for our buck when we get out in front of the community to not only do we talk to individuals and families about guardianship, but we also go out to other organizations that are serving the same populations that we serve. So we go to our hospitals. We go to REMSA. We go to our homeless services. We go to NAMS. We go to all these different organizations that serve similar populations. And we help educate not only about the end of what guardianship is, but what are those least restrictive alternatives in there. And I think being able to get out in front of it is really important. Planning for your life and planning for who is going to make the decisions when you cannot make those decisions, it doesn't start when somebody is in a hospital or referred to guardianship. It starts very early. Just like you want to make sure that you have an estate plan for your children, you want to have a plan for yourself, too. If I can't make those decisions, who do I trust to make those decisions? And so helping people understand that this planning can start very early and helping other organizations that encounter these people at multiple areas, whether it's in the hospital, in the jail, in the homeless shelter, signing up for services through children's services. These are all opportunities where we can talk to people about advanced planning for themselves and their families. So a couple of quick stories I want to tell you. There's a group in Washoe County. It is hosted by the State of Nevada Adult Protective Services Organization, and it's a Washoe County multidisciplinary team meeting. This is a meeting of professionals, and about five to six years ago, there were four or five people who attended this meeting. And my staff didn't want me to go to this meeting because every time I came back, I had a stack of referrals for guardianship. Like, OK, here's all your new guardianship cases. What we've done in this community over the last five years is we have been very proactive, inviting public and private partners into that room to submit referrals. So sometimes when people call me, because they know me, and they say, oh, what do I do about this case? I say, oh, I mean, I'd be happy to help you, but why don't you submit a referral to this group? Because you don't get to just talk to me. You get to talk to that entire group. And that group is filled with people from our own county, multiple departments in Washoe County, multiple state agencies. private partners, hospitals, REMSA, Medicaid, are all in attendance at this meeting. And so rather than, and through this process, I've been able to educate about what guardianship is, what less restrictive alternatives there are. We've invited private partners that provide those less restrictive alternatives to that group so that they can raise their hand and say, oh, I'd be happy to help. I have room on my caseload. And we have really put in the minds of that group that guardianship is something that happens as a last resort, if at all. And if guardianship does need to happen, then let's look to the family and their friends and their supporters for guardianship to happen because those people know the person well. I don't know the person that I'm appointed to. And that puts me in a very different position to make those decisions. So this group now is really... Getting services into the homes of individuals. And we see very few guardianship referrals that come out of this group. And these are not easy cases. These are complicated cases in our community that we're discussing. There is a protection in that group. There's a statute that allows everything to be confidential in there. So it allows us to share real information, but we can't take that information out of that group and use it for any other purpose other than to provide services. So people are also protected in that sense. And then the last story I want to tell you about is just something that happened a couple of weeks ago. A family contacted me. They had a young son that is mentally ill. This is a family that has mental illness in their family. And they were essentially referred At the age of 18, now that your child is 18, you now need to go get a guardian. That is the next logical step for you to be able to help your child. Because at 18, you have your own ability to make your own decisions, right? So this family said, well, now you need to go get a guardian. So they did that. They filed the paperwork. They went and asked for a guardian. And our office, as a routine, reached out to them and said, Help me understand why you want the government to be making decisions for your child. Help me understand what it is that you're concerned about. What led you to this? Let's talk about guardianship a little bit. Has anybody talked to you about less restrictive alternatives? Let me tell you about a few tools that we have in our community that you could use instead. Let's talk about the reality of what it's going to be like raising this child with a mental illness into adulthood and some of the things that may or may not happen. And what happened is nobody had talked to them about any of those things. But that is, we believe that's really important in our department to educate people. So that family did not choose to get a guardian. They chose to use less restrictive alternatives. And they know that that may work for now and it may not work forever. And they might find themselves getting a guardian later on. later on, but it allowed that individual who just turned 18 to keep his rights intact. It allows him to make decisions. His parents are there to support him in the way that they can. And I think that that is honestly the story that Cheyenne and Nicole are saying about using education in our community to really get the tools, the information, and the support out there for individuals. We all do things for the county that individuals do for themselves. And when we serve in those roles in Washoe County, and that's our job title, I think it's also really helpful for us to spend time doing that education so that people can serve themselves.

All right. So that will take us into a discussion with the board about what is your vision of success related to helping our community empower themselves to do, as Ms. Bowles said, take care of themselves rather than relying on government to take care of them. You know, there are situations where we provide services on an emergency basis, but that also then starts to bleed into kind of that day-to-day services that our community expects for government to provide. We may not have those resources available. In fact, we don't, quite frankly. So if someone can empower themselves to do that work, you know, how can we assist them? And what is your vision for that? uh, as a board, you know, for the successful rollout of that. So that our other departments, uh, who are doing examples of these, these things daily, uh, you know, really themselves feel empowered to bring forward ideas and to help, uh, communicate, I think is, you know, is a, is a strong piece about communicate exactly what it is we do and how that helps them. And those things that we don't do, uh, we get an awful lot of, oh, I need this taken care of. And then let's go to the, you know, let's call 3-1-1. And the next thing you know, we're going down a path trying to, assist one person to make a decision that they could have made by themselves. So how do we help educate our citizenry to be really more self-sufficient? That's what they've asked for when we go out and survey them. We don't want the government around. We want to do it ourselves. So how can we, you know, what is your vision to help us kind of create those programs as a strategy within Washoe County? So with that, I'll turn it over to the chair.

Thanks. Anybody want to also ask any questions as well since We have all these great folks here. Yep, Commissioner Hill.

Thank you. And to our public administrator, one of your slides said that you have been taking on estates because we don't have enough or large estates because of a lack of estate planning by those individuals. Do you... So can we not refer them to private estate folks that are these large estates that are coming into our care?

There are referrals that we get that we do refer out. It really depends on the family members. So we get the referral from the medical examiner's office and we reach out to the family. There are often times when the family's just, nope, not doing anything. We're done. We're not addressing this. There are other times when the family does have that, no, we don't want government involved role. And then they reach out to a private attorney and then we release it to them.

Okay.

But there's oftentimes when there's not family or there's just, we have a case right now where the decedent had been living in his home with his stepdaughter. She had moved in with him and his wife. Wife passed away about four years ago. So she's a stepdaughter. He had no will in place. So we're having to displace her from her home. She's been very cooperative. We're working very closely with her to make this as seamless as possible for her because we're going to have to do something with that house because her stepfather never put anything in place.

Right.

As far as family for him, near as we can tell, he may have family in Scotland. Right now, we don't have money to do air research because the states are all self-funded. So until we sell that home and have some resources, then we can do the resource and try to find the family to turn funds over to. But oftentimes early on in the cases, there is nobody else, no other option. If we find that will, we will find the named administrator or trust, find that trustee and turn it over to them.

Okay. Oh man, that is tough. So is there opportunity for us to advocate on the state level to make wills easier for folks to do themselves?

I would love to see legislation in place that would make wills storable in the lock box that Ms. Bowles mentioned, right now that is limited to medical directives and living wills, but not actual wills or trusts. But to have a resource like that would be phenomenal.

Okay. Well, maybe that's another future BDR for us to look at. And I would just say, you all have really hard jobs. You have to be in the community to really be effective every day. making contacts, relationships with community members, community groups, it's exhausting. And so I just admire the work that you're doing. I know it's really tough to be out in the community, but that's the only way to do it. I'm really feeling armed with better education for me to do a better job advocating for y'all, because that's also my job to help you let community members know about these resources and that there's alternatives as well. I went through a like three month period where I was finding so many dogs. It was crazy. And I would try to call the people cause I was like, I don't want to take them, you know, to you. Um, so it's so cool that we have those scanners and I think just continuing and you've got them out front, right? Those scanners or do you have to go inside for that?

The self-serving microchip stations are inside, so they're protected from the elements, but they are self-serving and we have instructions on how to utilize them so that it's easy for a good Samaritan to use.

Right. So then, but if it's after hours, they're going to go into the little box, which I have sadly dropped some dogs off into as well. Um, as there's no like scanner outside that you could call the people.

There is not. We do have a microchip scanner in our night drop boxes at the shelter. But that's not going to help the average citizen because we don't give out that code to individuals. That's for our law enforcement partners and for emergency veterinary hospitals. However, we are on duty until 10 o'clock. our field staff every single day of the year. So we can come out, scan an animal for you.

And then we could call. Okay.

Or we'll call and we can call on your behalf.

Yes. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for the work.

Vice Chair Garcia.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Many of you have been with the county a long time. Thank you for your service, first and foremost. You've seen this role change as our population has changed. We live in a digital world right now. I know some of you, I'm looking at your websites, have frequently asked questions on your websites. I know Cheyenne has her own Facebook page, which I know maybe is not an option for everybody in the room. But can you talk to me about the technology side of how you communicate with our public?

That's a great question and actually one of my goals. So I have requested to work with our communications department because I think that they can leverage that message that I give personally and within the groups that I speak to out a little further. And so I hope that in the next year that's what you're going to see from our department is a way where we are leveraging out that communication a little bit more broadly. I do participate on the state of Nevada guardianship commission. So we do work statewide. We also, this year, were able to start something called the Nevada Network. And it is a network of National Guardianship Association members throughout Nevada that are working together. And so we hope that we'll be able to leverage each other in terms of that communication. People can call my office whenever they want. We answer our phones when they call. We also talk to people when they are in those intercepts of court or in hospitals or things like that. And I say, all of our staff will say, even if you choose to be the guardian for your person, we're a public-serving agency. So you call us whenever you have a question. You reach out to us. That's what we're here to do. Okay.

Our situation is a little bit different because we are not public facing. People aren't calling us looking for help with handling what happens after somebody's passed away because we don't offer wills and trust services up front, which is why we're looking to partner with other departments who have that ability to reach out to the public and be able to assist with them in programs that they're putting out.

Anyone else? Well, I have a few things. One, I'll echo the Vice Chair. Thank you so much. I've certainly visited Nicole and I serve on the Animal Services Advisory Board and certainly enjoyed all of your updates that you have provided. But it feels like there is a commonality with y'all in the sense of it's... how almost like a did you know campaign. Did you know? Did you know? Did you know? And I wonder if given that there are 25 departments across Washoe County, that's a lot of did you knows. But I do think helping us as commissioners, helping the community might be something that's missing in terms of connecting all of this information, because this is why I think the workshops are so powerful, because it allows everyone to actually even get more in-depth information than they might even have. But this is just one time, even though we're having continual opportunities, but there already are, in my opinion, infrastructures in place, like all the cab meetings, as an example. So I'm just gonna throw out an idea. Wouldn't it be great to have, and I'm gonna have communications probably cringe when they hear me say this, but wouldn't it be great to have in our cab packets a document that actually has all of the links directly to the various, maybe did you knows, and a highlight of what that is, did you know, did you know, and I'm making this up on the fly, did you know the governor can make decisions at the end of your life for you? No, I'm guessing most people click on that link. So all I'm saying is that, I don't know what the answer is to these questions about exactly how we do it, but I think there are tools and I think the fact that we're looking at leveraging partnerships and leveraging what we already have to not actually add another layer of a cost, right? And so this also proves how important staff is because everything that y'all are touching is having an impact on also the emotional piece of it as well, right? Every single one of you. and many other departments that are here. So I think looking at, for instance, one of the things I'm really proud of championing is having all the statistics for law enforcement and fire at all the cabs and that it's directly related to that particular community and it's in the packet. And if there's hyperlinks, they can go to it. So that's where I'm kind of coming from. I'm thinking of that. I also wonder if there isn't an opportunity even to have a little beginning of a did you know. I know that Animal Services has been out to, like for instance, Spanish Springs CAB, but I think that there are other opportunities. There are also large organizations themselves that gather for various reasons. So I just think whether it's the technology or whether it's what is that self-efficiency of, for instance, all the fire departments have a microchip scanner. They may not know that. That might be helpful to somebody that it's after hours and the fire station is usually open. So I just wonder if we can continue to think out of the box, I suppose. I know that's a cliche, but how we, again, look at being proactive versus reactive. I really, really appreciate, again, a big thank you to all of you for what you do, because I bet most people didn't even realize some of what you're sharing today and how important it is. And then the last thing I'll say, especially, I think, not that animals aren't in this category, but I do think these are difficult discussions for families to have. And I think we go along our life... not necessarily wanting to face that, wanting to face those discussions. So as an example, within a state attorney that I used, I asked him, we had our children come in with us, and he had mentioned that isn't necessarily something that usually happens because it's a lot of paperwork, it's a lot of legal, but I think that was something that I thought was important for our children to hear. directly from us. And so I think it's a hard subject to brace when you're trying to be proactive and get in front of it when it's a subject that no one wants to necessarily face. But if they don't do it on the front end, look at what happens on the back end and look at to the family and to the stepdaughter. And when I visited and toured your facility, heard other stories that are heartbreaking and you have heartbreaking stories, you have heartbreaking stories. So maybe we can stop breaking hearts and try and actually have a proactive approach and use us more. Maybe you can use us more as vehicles and use the cabs and use those links and maybe again communications will probably have a conversation with me after. But I know that county managers since taking this role as chair has heard this a million times. We have to do a better job of sharing all this information and you are doing it. And this also proves why we are in the customer service business and why staff is so critical. And having the best staff is actually a representation of you here, along with many others that aren't here. So thank you for all you do. Thanks for your staff. And I hope that we can continue to see more subjects rise to the top. that maybe don't necessarily have had that opportunity in the past because they're important. And it's inevitable. What did you say, one out of seven are going to lose? One out of three. Maybe we can stop breaking hearts today and have a did you know campaign and use us and use some of the vehicles to you guys' point of the departments that are already there. So I'm going to invite you guys to come to the CAB, for instance, and share some of this information because I think it's really important. The last thing I'll add is I do think sometimes we are a culture, a society of pictures and headlines. No one really takes the time to read much anymore unless you're me with a cup of coffee, which I don't drink anymore, and the Wall Street Journal, which is always a gift. But the reality is that's just people are run, run, run, run, run, run. And I wonder if there might be even opportunities of if this Did You Know campaign of having even little videos where we have an opportunity to share like a did you know and I'm just throwing out these ideas. So it's spaghetti on the wall and I'll stop at that point. I'll end it by just saying I think the Washoe Checkbook is an example of that as well, like how many people are accessing that and the video and the tutorial on how to use it I think is another example of something that maybe you wouldn't have thought of from a Washoe County perspective. So I'll use that as an example. But if there's not anything else, can we give you a big thank you for all you do? And Nicole, we get to see you. Yes.

We get to see you, Nicole. Come visit us more.

If you don't know where Nicole's office is, you are welcome to come. All of you are welcome, by the way, to come. But certainly we appreciate seeing you and thanks to you for your team. And thank you, Ms. Bowles. And thank you, Michelle, for everything. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. If we can transition up to our reimagining county hiring and recruitment, we'll take just a quick moment to swap out some name tags and some staff. This is where there's a commercial bay? Yes.

And then elevator music. Thank you.

Okay. play the whole music.

Yeah. I hope everyone enjoyed that commercial and now it's 1104. We're going to go ahead and start this meeting, but HR's in the house. This is awesome. I can't wait. We've been talking about people and the importance of staff. Chief Justice Walker made it very clear that we can never say thank you enough and how important our staff is and why we literally don't have much turnover because And I think that's a testament to a lot of things and why this is a great place to work. And what we do, everyone's hearing is just a snippet of the 25 departments that are here. So the importance of staff is critical. And boy, is this going to be exciting to learn about. recruitment strategies and what have you. Manager Thomas.

Thank you. It's a perfect segue. It really starts with staff. It starts with the 3,000 plus employees that we have at this organization. When we talked about building a strategic plan, we built that on the heels of the budget process. So hopefully we're all seeing today that the budget process leads into the strategic plan development, which is what we're talking about now, so that we can have resources in the future. And we know that our biggest cost in this organization is people. And as such, I built from the strategic plan and the budget a set of goals that I've talked to my five bosses about achieving as an organization, met with the executive staff. And I want to read the one that is themed around operational excellence. and culture and workforce because you all know that that was a big thing for me coming into the organization my focus really being internal and so around that theme which leads us here today is for me as the county manager with all of our staff and the help of HR and the help of the board to prioritize recruitment retention and stability to foster a positive internal environment Washoe County will be an employer of choice an employer that promotes integrity effective communication employee wellness, and quality public service while fostering a fair and safe workplace. And that happens with the work of all of us. This really doesn't center around the incredible staff that we have here, but those that we hope to bring in in the future. So with that, I would like to turn it over to our very talented HR director, Patricia Hurley, to lead us through what we're doing and how we're thinking about this differently.

to push that button and hold it.

Yeah, you got it.

Am I on? You're on. Oh, I can really hear myself.

Okay.

If you move the base... Too much technology here, right? Okay. So, you know, playing off what Manager Thomas said and the theme you guys have all been hearing today, it's all about our people.

You're going to have to move it closer.

It really is about the people and the employees that work for Washoe County and those that prospectively will work for us in the future. So playing off all of that, why does it matter how we have to strengthen recruitment? It matters because recruitment directly impacts the county's ability to hire, attract, and provide quality service to the community and to strengthen Washoe County's reputation as an employer of choice. In today's environment, we are more than just simply filling vacancies. We need to attract and retain the right people and try to do this right the first time. This means recruiting top candidates who possess not only the experience and training requirements that are needed from departments, but also, most importantly, the critical soft skills, which I just learned a new term, power skills that drive success. These include communication, accountability, adaptability, of course, problem solving, and most importantly, customer service. All of this presents an opportunity to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency in the recruitment process and to better align hiring with the county's mission and service expectations. Because, of course, as Manager Thomas said, we are here to build a healthy, productive workforce and a positive organizational culture. I did neglect to introduce the team that is next to me, so I'd like to go ahead and do that. I have Julie Paholke, who is our HR Division Director over Talent Management, and I have Indu Moore, who is our Senior Human Resources Business Partner. Now in order, why do we do this by, why do we have to align recruitment? Well, it's important because it has to align with our county mission, our strategic priorities, and most importantly, meeting our community needs. Washoe County recruitment practices utilize a balancing approach to hiring. We look at minimum qualifications as kind of the baseline, And then we also need, but the most important powerful thing is the power skills, those soft skills. They prioritize and they are actually the differentiators to make sure that we really make an applicant stand out and that we have good employees. We would enhance the recruitment process to improve candidate evaluations and selection models. We'll consistently across departments and we'll also create efficiencies in our hiring. So I'm excited for you to hear why we do what we do, where we have been and what has changed, and where we are heading into the future. So with that, I will hand that over to Julie Polky.

Good morning. Can everyone hear me?

A little closer. Is it on? Okay, good morning. HR, HR is going to, here we go. Real close.

Third time's the charm. Good morning. There we go. Thank you. So I'm here to talk about the overview of the recruitment process. And it starts when a department lets us know they're going to have a vacancy. If we have an eligible list of candidates ready, which we do in many cases, we'll send that to them. so they can begin their interview process. If we don't have an eligible process or list available, we'll work with them on a recruitment plan. We'll talk about those minimum qualifications Patricia mentioned. We'll talk about the job description. We'll talk about the ideal candidate. We'll talk about the timeline, and we'll do this together to develop our recruitment plan. We've moved to more of a soft skills test that we'll talk a little bit more about in our presentation. The candidates apply. We screen those candidates and those who qualify and move forward to the test process. Top candidates in the testing process then move on for interviews with the department. We have a few things that guide us that we wanted to talk about. The minimum time for us to recruit is 10 days. and that's because of collective bargaining unit agreements. We can go longer than 10 days, we can go 14, two weeks, three weeks, and those are the discussions we have with the departments when we put together the plan. We also have the NRS who has A law that says any county in Nevada that has a population of over 100,000 is called a merit system. So we are a merit system, and that means that we test for our processes. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that, too, because we don't test every single time. We also have federal guidelines that were developed by the EEOC, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor. And they require that everything we do in the recruitment and selection process is job related.

So I'll turn it over to Indhu.

Thank you, Julie. So as Julie mentioned, once HR is notified of a vacancy, we work with the hiring department to develop the recruitment plan. And this is really a collaborative process between both HR and the department. If it is a new classification, this includes creating a new class specification or job description, which includes developing the minimum qualifications for the position. And although HR does develop the minimum qualifications, we rely on our departments because they are the technical subject matter experts. And if it is an existing classification, we still review the class specification and minimum qualifications to make any necessary updates. In this process, we do work with the department to determine what they are looking for from their ideal candidate, what are the key skills and qualifications needed for success, and what may have been missed with previous recruitments. We also research the positions through O-Net, which is a database of occupational information that's put together by the Department of Labor. Again, we work with department subject matter experts, and then we also research comparable jobs with other city and county jurisdictions. It is also important to note that most of our minimum qualifications are written with an equivalency statement to broaden the net of qualifications. For example, if a degree is within the minimum qualifications and an applicant does not have a degree, we will accept additional work experience to substitute for the degree. And now moving on to our screening process. This process starts when an applicant submits the online application. The HR business partner will screen the application and if we are unsure whether or not the applicant meets the minimum qualifications, we will partner with the department subject matter expert for their input and feedback. Once a determination has been made on the application, the candidate is notified via email. If an applicant is disqualified, their notice will advise them of the appeal process and applicants can submit an appeal with clarifying information to demonstrate why they meet the minimum qualifications. Now moving on to the exam and referral process. Once the appeal process has been concluded, qualified candidates are invited to participate in the examination process. If we end up with fewer than 20 candidates, we will waive the exam. The exam may be administered remotely, or we could also hold performance examinations where candidates are tested on job simulated exercises. Once the exams have been scored, a ranked eligible list consisting of both internal and external candidates will be created. And from there, the top ranked candidates will be referred to the department for the interview. Now I'll hand it over to Julie to talk about our hiring process evolution.

Since 2020, we've made some very significant changes to our recruitment process that we're really proud of. The first thing we did is transition to an online recruitment system called NeoGov, and it is specific for public sector. So cities, counties, and states use it, which is great for us because they understand what we do. And they continue to come up with updates and upgrades to make their process easier, which makes our process easier as well. In 2021, we implemented computer-based testing, which took us away from the number two pencil and scan drum testing that we've been giving for quite some time. In 2022, we developed the Washoe County Handbook. And the way we did this is we used the merit code and we took everything that was related to recruitment and we put it in our handbook. And that allows us a lot of efficiency and a lot of flexibility. So if something's not working, we can change it. And I'll give you an example. In our merit code, and we did this forever, it says if a candidate qualifies or doesn't qualify, you need to give them seven days notice. And if they'd like to appeal, they have seven days notice and you need to give them seven days notice to test and then seven days notice to interview. And it took us a little while to figure that out, but that was written in the early 1970s when there was no technology and all of this information was delivered via us mail. So now that we have technology, we've been able to change those timelines. incredibly and make them much more faster, which is great for the candidates on the departments that the process moves much more quickly. In 2023, we launched an unproctored and remote testing process. We allow candidates now don't, they don't have to come and test. We send them a link and they take the exam. So we get candidates from all over the country. that don't have to come here to take the exam. In 19, 2024, we changed our recruitment frequency because there are jobs and positions that many departments have. For example, our clerical series, our admin series. So we don't wait until a department says, hey, I need someone. We recruit regularly for those positions because we know that departments need to fill those jobs when we're open. So those are examples of a list that we have

and we recruit regularly for those positions.

We have a new supervisory exam that was developed that focuses on supervisory concept as well as the soft skills. And in 1926, we moved the business, did I say something? 1926. I don't know. 2026.

You're celebrating the 250th year of America.

That must be what it is. That's what's happening right now. That must be what it is, yes. So we moved to a business partner program from the analysts that we work with the departments prior to them having the vacancy, work with them through the process, work with them through the interviews and the selection process. So I want to talk a little bit more about NeoGov and how we've really leveraged that for efficiency. As I said, it was so much technology when we had it. It was amazing, but they continue to add more technology. And a few things that we think are great and we've gotten good feedback from our candidates is we can text them. And we can text them and say, hey, don't forget this, or hey, what about this? So that's been great. Another thing that's been great for us is interview self-screening. So a department can put together the interview schedule and they can send it out and people could grab their phone and go, okay, that looks good for me. And it's done right away. There's not a lot of time that we need to go through that process. So it's really helped expedite the process for the candidates to take the exam, for them to take the test, and for us to get those results out and to get the list to the departments. in a much quicker timeline than we did before. Using NeoGov, they are affiliated with governmentjobs.com. And we look at where our candidates hear about our jobs because we think that's really important because we want to know where to advertise and where they come from. So the highest number of candidates we receive comes from government jobs, which is through NeoGov. And that's 32% of the applicants. So we think that's a pretty big number and a good reason to continue to use NeoGov.

Okay.

HR and these mics. So I'm going to go ahead and talk about these, about unproctored testing. Again, in 2023, HR had moved to unproctored remote testing through a new exam vendor. Some of the benefits of unproctored remote testing include increased accessibility to our candidates. Candidates no longer have to take time off of work to come take one of our exams. We're also able to reach a broader candidate pool of out-of-state candidates who do not have to travel to take our exam and then oftentimes have to travel again for the interview process. We've also identified significantly improved candidate attrition rates which we attribute to candidates not having to take time off of work for the exam process. We've also noted increased efficiency, which includes better use of staff resources, cost savings for our department, and quicker turnaround of eligible lists to our hiring departments. The remote testing model also has resulted in progressive advancement for the county in terms of no longer, again, using pencils and scantrons for our testing, and using a process that's more in alignment with industry standards. This model of testing was met with positive feedback from both hiring departments and candidates. Candidates are able to enjoy a more efficient and convenient process, and hiring departments are able to interview candidates more quickly. And as far as soft skills exams, in 2023 we implemented a newly designed professional level exam and this exam is administered remotely with an increased focus on assessing a candidate's soft skills. In the past, we would create technical job-specific exams for certain recruitments. And as the minimum qualifications already assess the applicants for their technical skills, using soft skills-based testing allows us to remove repeated evaluations of the applicants' technical skills. We find this process to be more efficient as we can use the professional level exam for multiple positions and again are able to administer the exam remotely. In addition, the applicant does not have to retake the exam for different recruitments within a set period of time. The professional level exam is used for entry to mid-level recruitments and assesses soft skills such as basic reasoning, situation handling, conflict resolution, customer service, and interpersonal skills. And then as Julie mentioned, in 2025, we developed a new supervisory level exam, which is also administered remotely and assesses broader supervisory concept, including soft skills needed to be an effective supervisor.

I'm going to talk about the impacts of the last five years. And the best one is leveraging technology. And we've worked with Bezod and his staff at TS to help us do that. And so we just want to give him and his team a shout out. They continue to help us. And NeoGov, it's been a great collaboration. Over the last five years, we have received an average of 11,000 applications. That's per year. When we went back and looked at the statistics, 32% were from government jobs. 27% of the candidates we receive heard about the job on our website. And 1,100 applicants have been referred to us each year from Washoe County employees. So that says a lot. If Washoe County employees are going to go say to their friends and family, hey, you should apply with us, and 1,100 of the candidates we get each year come from that, that makes us feel really good. We're continuing to improve what we do. When we talked about how we used to recruit, now how we recruit, it used to take three to four weeks to get that department they're eligible is after we tested. And now it's literally a couple days. So we've closed that gap. We do continue to update those class specifications because, as you know, jobs change and there could be a vacancy and then there's another vacancy. And as Indy talked about, it's really important that we capture what that is because we want the candidates to know what they're going to be doing. We want everything to be current and clear. Few more impacts over the last five years that we're proud of, and this is not just for us, this is for the entire county. Our retention rate has been excellent, our turnover rate has been excellent, and our vacancy rate has been strong. But what I wanna talk about is we have turnover but people don't leave for us. Turnover means that positions open and oftentimes it's at a high level in a department because there's a retirement and we recruit and someone internally takes that position and then we recruit because someone else takes that position. So turnover means positions open and we fill those internally and we do quite a bit of that. So while our vacancy rate remains strong, it's because there are a lot of positions being filled internally. So due to that internal movement, it shows we have a lot of vacancies but we don't have as many vacancies as it looks like because we fill them internally. Any questions on that? And we show the chart with our vacancy rate and how that has been going down.

So I will share a little bit about what we have upcoming. And we are very excited about continued improvements that we're making to our recruitment and selection process. Recently, we reached out to our partnering agency, Clark County, to learn more about how they handle their recruitment selection process. And we specifically reached out to them because they are bound by the same merit system that we follow. As a result, we are initiating a pilot program to use NeoGov to screen applications and rank candidates. Candidate names will be provided to departments for interviews, and the interview itself will serve as the exam and will be ranked and scored, and the top candidate will be selected from that point. We have also placed an increased focus on using various tools in NeoGov to improve efficiency. As NeoGov adapts to their users' needs and requests, they're constantly creating new tools in the system, which we can then capitalize on to improve our processes. We're also working with technology services to effectively use AI in the recruitment and selection process. We will be creating an internal services group to provide feedback on pain points of the recruitment and selection process to better help us identify where some of the gaps still are. We are also working to develop a poll survey to provide to new employees during new employee orientation for feedback on their experiences during both the recruitment and onboarding process. And as approximately 13% of our workforce is eligible for retirement in the next five years, we are placing an increased focus on succession planning and mentorship opportunities for our employees. And we are also partnering with colleges on job fairs and internships for our departments. We have been including our departments in our job fairs so interested candidates can speak directly to the subject matter experts. And we are attending more job fairs than ever to increase our visibility to the community that we serve. Now I'll hand it over to Patricia to close us out.

I'd like to call this one our kind of shameless plug that we offer, but we do host internal and external resume writing and interview skills training a few times a year. For our internal people, we do have those available in April, June, and September. And in 2022, since 2022, we've hosted over 15 of those sessions. But I'd also like to take a moment to think about how we partner with people. So I'd like to thank Tracy Bowles because she came up with this idea and said, why are we only limiting this to internal? Why don't we also look out for external? How do we apply? How do we get there? What do you need from us? How do we write a resume? So we have partnered with our community, and we actually partnered with the Human Services Agency because, as you know, and you've heard from them already, caseworkers are very vital to this organization. So in March, there was a session held for UNR graduates who would like to become caseworkers because what happens with HSA is they intern these individuals, they come and they work for them, and then they have what kind of happens, what we heard from that department is then they go and apply for us and they're not as successful as others that may be really good at understanding the system and how it works. And so what we do is we go out there and we teach them how they can get in, what makes it easier for them and started that. I'd also like to say open for all the general public, we do have a session open for this on Thursday, May 28th from 4.30 to 6.30. All the public is invited to attend this if they'd like to understand how our recruitment process works. We help you with your resume and, of course, give you some interview skills, trainings, and techniques. So with that... Thank you.

That's it. Thank you. We hope that everybody, I have never since I've been here in almost nine years heard an immersive explanation of how we hire at Washoe County. I don't know if everyone, I don't know that anyone's heard that. So I really appreciate you walking us through it, showing us how far we've come. So as we look for the commission, to the commission and to you as leaders and policy makers, I know that you don't work individually with all levels of the organization. That's really where I come in. But at the same time, we were trying to get a little bit of information from you about what values do you feel that Washoe County employees exemplify? What would you like to see? I know some of you, transparency is the number one thing that I keep hearing from you that you want from me as the manager, employees. giving us information but I'd love to have the chair walk us through maybe some discussion points so we can gather some information during the session on what you think employees should look like.

I have three quick questions.

I know I have some questions too.

Thank you. So losing institutional knowledge is a big deal. It's a big loss to the county. We lose money if we're just sitting around waiting to hire that next great person. So are staff required to share projected retirement dates, or are you just looking at how close people are getting to the 30-year or 25-year mark?

They're not required to. Many do. The 13% comes from those who are eligible to retire.

What we are working on, though, is we have worked with TS because they have helped us develop what's called a workforce development type tool that we'll try to work with departments on. And so, what we can do is do kind of a prediction. So, we'll look at someone's maybe year of service, their age, kind of how they are. We used that one time in CSD, which was a success because when we looked out, we had facilities, all of the facility technicians were pretty close to retirement. So what that tool did is it allowed the department to plan ahead and be able to recruit, not to be more, like the word, proactive, rather than reactive in our hiring and so that's what we plan on doing is working with TS to further look at that spreadsheet and be able to work with departments in order to model that so that we can give departments where they lie and where they have because unfortunately some people do not tell us when they're going to retire it's usually the most minimum they have to give us is two weeks but then you do have really good employees who will tell us well in advance Though sometimes they're fearful of that too because then they feel like, oh, no, they're being replaced because of succession planning. So we try to walk a really delicate line and allow employees to tell us when they're going to retire. So I hope that answers your question. Yes, it does. Thank you. You're welcome.

I'm on the job board. We've got 26 jobs open. It's broken down by department, so it's really easy to navigate the job board. So that's great because I refer a lot of people to come look at the county job. But I don't know if it's coincidence, but over the years, as I've referred people to the county job board, there are difficult to fill positions. Like I'm thinking of the registered nurse at juvenile services. That one is seems to be always there. So what do we do internally when we have I know, you know, the frequent flyers better than I do. But when you look at those positions over time, is there anything we do internally to help?

Well, I think that's what came in with the classification and comp study when we took a look at that to see what we could do to look at the pay out there to the market. The unfortunate thing with nurses, it's really hard to compete with the private sector when it comes to those type of pays. But I think what you saw at the board But I remember during the budget presentation is that juvenile services will have to pivot because, unfortunately, no matter what we do, it's straight to hire. That's one of those positions where testing is not required because, as a nurse, you already come in with a licensure. So we have to become more innovative in how we look at those positions, whether it even makes sense that Washoe County has registered nurses in the future for somebody like juvenile services and whether they have to just – I think what they're going to do is hopefully come on to the contract with the jail. So looking at different ways to handle those very difficult to recruit positions. Another way we look at those things besides that is we look at a job and if we continue not able to open them with the current minimum qualifications, we ask the department, is there a way to open up those qualifications? Because as Manager Thomas said, we're looking for someone very enthusiastic that wants to work for the county and see whether we can train them for those skills. And that happened with our building official. It took a really long time to get somebody to come here. No matter what they did, they couldn't get success at it. And so they did open up the minimum qualifications, which then opened up the pool. And I believe now they're sitting with a pretty good building official that they're teaching and we needed great leadership skills. So then they were able to come in for those other things.

All right, great. And last question, super quick. Do we do exit surveys?

Those are one of the things. Yes, we do. We do ask departments to do exit surveys, but one of the things that you'll see coming from Manager Thomas is we are going to do a better job of that. And so we are looking at technology as we do the SAP upgrade that you'll hear about more in the future. One of the things we're doing is onboarding and offboarding. That is number one on the list of things that Human Resources is looking for because we don't capture it as well. Departments do the best that they can, but it's not done as infrequently in the way that we should be doing it.

Thank you.

Commissioner Hill.

I'm glad we're going to use AI. But we need to probably document how it will be different than manually looking at resumes and cover letters and whether it is opening us up to more diverse applicants, which I'm hoping it will because there's always inherent bias with male or female candidates or with folks, you know, who represent different parts of our community. And so maybe AI will help us with hiring more diverse people, which I'm hoping for, but I think we need to know if that's happening or if it's not happening. And I think that what I'm, of course, I'm reading the worst things about AI right now, but you know, that it can, we, AI is what we put into it. So inherent bias can come into AI. And so I just want to make sure that we're being really thoughtful as we're using this tool and that there's some accountability on our end to see if this is working and if it's meeting our goals or if you know we need to add that human element as part of that um but that would be my only comment for you shifting to the clark county model i think that's great you're asking our partners of what to do And I thought it was so great that you held, I'm not sure if HR did this or just the manager's office, but that leadership academy for folks who want to be supervisors in the future and making sure that we can get some mentorship and some, hey, what would you do? And, you know, relationships across different departments and that supportive culture is great. And I'm so proud of the work that you're doing in the community and all these different job fairs and community events. I know you have just put in so much effort to make sure we're more in the community. So thank you for doing that. That's an essential part of what we need to do. We can't just have the same folks, you know, coming in and working for the county. We want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be part of this incredible organization. So thank you very much for your work. I appreciate all of you. Welcome.

Anybody else have anything?

Okay, I have a couple things.

One is soft skills, power skills, That subject, I believe, has a direct correlation to building the cultural piece. And I'm wondering how that is going to be connected. In other words, if you're looking at where do you get this from? Is it something you can customize? I'm just curious how these soft skills, if you're using it as an evaluation piece or people essentially are looking at maybe the technical piece of a job or the qualifications for the tasks that are required, but then that soft skill component. I mean, I really believe other than technical training, you can't necessarily teach people kindness You can't teach people to actually collaborate. You can't really teach people in the sense of other than creating a culture that that's what's expected and accepted. And I'm wondering how does that power skill come into play? Because it's a very, very important component to any position that is fulfilled. Okay.

I can speak to that. We work with departments on their interview process and oftentimes most of the questions are focused on soft skills to see how they respond to things. And then sometimes they'll do performance demonstrations And the department will watch to determine how they might handle a situation or how they might talk with a difficult customer to identify if they have the level of soft skills they're looking for.

So it is customizable is what I was also looking at. So it is customizable in terms of what it is. So, for instance, critical thinking skills are always welcome. And I don't think that this is just an observation. They're not... necessarily taught as early as we would like those critical skills to be taught in the education system. So I don't know how you feel about that, but that's another discussion. But I do think there are certain jobs that actually would benefit from some of those power skills over other jobs. And so that's where I was coming from on how. But I think there is an overarching piece of a culture of acceptance that is expected within the organization of being truthful and being honest. You know, these things that we think are inherent in everyone that aren't necessarily extrapolated the same way until you see a person come in. So it's from that where I was coming from, but also on the exit piece that was asked, because I actually had that question too, is how Are you looking at measuring that and then seeing how things can actually evolve from that exit strategy if there are patterns or things that come into play? Just wondering what that might look like. Or is that still under development? Maybe it's a little early more to come?

I think that's, I would say that's under development. But what's missing in between all of that, too, is performance management. So part of what we're looking at, too, is looking at performance management. We have... We've kind of put a pause on it given we're going to be looking at technology upgrade, but we have been looking at what's out there and what's possible because the missing link between once you get an employee on here is now how do we measure their performance? How do we coach them? The standard of performance oh let's give a performance evaluation every year is just not the model that we should be working on what we are looking at is the more coaching model where we do a lot more one-on-one feedback and so we've been looking at a lot of software in between all of that to make that happen that would then lead to you know making sure people are getting the feedback that they need that's the missing link is then as they exit we will then have the off-boarding software So we really are using technology to make a lot of this stuff happen. We're just in kind of the infant phases. We're working through SAP and its upgrade. But just stay tuned on that. You'll probably hear more about what's going to be happening.

Well, that's exciting because obviously everyone wants to have a high-performance team. And there's measurements and proven statistics on how to create that. So creating a culture of having 3,000-plus employees all be a high-performance team because we are in the customer service business, that then creates a skill set. And some of those inherent skills can be enhanced. And certainly the technical piece can come into it. So it'll be interesting to see what comes of that. More to come. What's the timeline?

Just curious. We're hoping in the next, I'm looking at this odd, but for TS, I would hope we'd love to get this up and running in the next two to three months. Wow. More to come. More to come.

Anything else? I don't know if we helped you with that. We didn't say anything. No, we didn't.

That's why I'm looking at her and feeling bad. I'm feeling bad. I felt like you helped us. I think you're telling us to stay the course, that you like what you see coming and you're excited to hear what we have for the future. That's what I heard. I heard it wrong. Please speak now.

Yeah, and I think the accountability piece of it is just inherent, that you do have an accountability and you have the expectation. And I think people rise to what that expectation is. And I think that is what's exciting. It's exciting about the Raftelis. It's exciting to actually participate with Raftelis and see that this is the benefit and having 3,000 employees actually rise to the level of the expectation, not of where they're at, but where they can be. And that's leadership. Vast leadership. And so it's exciting to see us move in that direction and where this will go. Really exciting. Yes.

Madam Chair, just a quick underscore for our amazing facilitator. I'm hearing more and more that the job market is getting harder for our young people, our current college students are recent college grads. So I really like the emphasis on the job fairs with our, you know, Truckee Meadows Community College, University of Nevada, Reno, those internship programs. Please keep that going because I'm hearing and feeling a great sense of urgency and anxiety about the changing employment landscape with AI. So thank you.

And I can add to further how we can make sure that these values are part of Washoe County. I mean, my career mentor has said the best way to hire someone is can they do the job, which means can you train them up if they don't have these specific... That's where I'm worried about AI pulling out words from resumes and... cover letters that people may not know how to do that. And just making sure that we're not leaving really decent people, you know, behind, but then, well, I like them while they're doing it. So that means, are they a kind person? Are they above and beyond? Do they care about the service to the public? Like I want, when people interact with Washoe County, I want them to walk away being like, wow, my county cares about me. MY COUNTY CARES ABOUT SOLVING MY PROBLEM. MY COUNTY IS GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND FOR ME BECAUSE EVEN THOUGH WE ARE STRAPPED AND WE HAVE, WE DON'T HAVE THE RESOURCES WE ALL WISH WE believe this, and I see it every day in our county employees, we have an incredibly high performing organization for being incredibly underfunded. And so, you know, just continuing to make sure that the community knows that we're there for them and we're there to support them. And that's part of the culture of the county. And, you know, that's in hiring, like the chair said, hiring people who are kind and, you you know, making sure that that comes across, you know, expertise is one thing, but, you know, making sure that service is fundamental in who they are. That's a huge part of making sure our supervisors no one know what they're hiring and being willing to train up on the things that are easier to train. So thank you.

You're welcome.

I'll just add that I think it's so interesting. This just shows you how old I am. But there was a time, Commissioner Hill, when we actually had that same discussion of automating things, right? And so now we've just evolved. to ai but i know it's true i mean there was a time where you'd have a staff person going through every single and that's a human element and then that got automated and so people good people to your point may not have made the cut to the final final piece and now you know we're evolving with a new level of technology and i also was just wondering how ai was going to be used but i guess we are going off and digressing, but I do think it's interesting of having a culture of how can I help you versus what do you need? And the feedback I'm getting is a lot of the great employees are here are saying, how can I help you? Not what do you need? I'm in a hurry. How can I help you? And I think that's a cultural shift. And again, kudos to the leadership and all of the folks here and everybody understanding that we are moving from good to great, right? Anything else? Well, thank you. It's always great to have HR, but we learned a lot. We learned a lot. And it'll be really exciting to have you come back and give us an update on what that looks like as you're moving on and how, and then the data-driven piece of it, then you can actually extrapolate that. So I think it's going to be exciting to see what comes. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, the best subject. Not that the other subjects weren't great, but... This is this is always important. Thank you. Thank you all. So Manager Thomas, are we doing a little bit of a break?

I think we're good. I think we've got our financial folks coming up. I know Elizabeth will help us switch out some name tags, but we're moving into the final portion here, which is bringing it all together and bringing it home through how do we do this with the limited and finite resources that we have. So with that, I'll turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Abby Jacobin, who is joined by Lori Cook, who you know well, our Budget Manager, Division Director, to talk about the financial strategy behind all of this.

Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. Again, Abby. Not much. Nope. Again, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. Again, Abby Jacobin, Chief Financial Officer, joined by my expert teammate, Lori Cook, Division Director of Budget. Madam Chair, Madam Vice Chair, members of the Board of County Commissioners, we are here to anchor the presentation. What an excellent day this has been. And now we're going to talk about the financial framework that the county has developed. that ties all of this together and makes it possible. And I'll note before we really get started that none of these things that we're going to say today are new. We're asking you to look at them from a different perspective, from a comprehensive perspective, and kind of a framework for how we get the things done that we need to get done every single day and to achieve your long-term vision. So I'll start, I'll hand it over, and then Ms. Koch will hand it back. So what do we mean by financial strategy and why is it critical to serving our taxpayer? We all have the same goal to optimize county resources and maximize services, make the most of the county dollar because we do have those finite resources and we don't want to overburden the taxpayer. So this framework is really foundational to our financial and to your visionary success. So we're listening very, very heavily as you're having this discussion today, the discussion you'll have in May, and then the subsequent strategic planning discussion you'll have in June, because as you set those priorities, there are 3,100 of us standing behind you ready to execute them, and we're very excited about that. This is long-term resource management. When Ms. Cook gets up in front of you and gives the five-year forecast and we see the freak-outedness meter, that gives us the ability... to really say in five years there's going to be trouble. We need to do X, Y, and Z, or recommend that you do X, Y, and Z in order to accommodate that. Because one of the things that really comes to my mind is when we're in an economic downturn and times are hard, We can't lean back. We have to lean in because that's when the taxpayer and the community need us the most. So this long-term resource management is absolutely critical. And you have this foundation in place to your credit to achieve this. Also knowing our financial limits. We don't have a lot of ability to raise our own taxes here in Nevada. Some states do and they still don't raise them because it's not affordable to the taxpayer. So regardless of whether or not you can, we don't. And so we need to know our limits. We need to know when to expand, when to hold the line, and when to contract. And it's our job to equip you to make those decisions. And these next items here, we could have gone on all day because these are things that we really talk about how we achieve these, but we picked out a couple of important ones. Deliberate budgeting based on the priorities. As you're setting these priorities today in May and in June, we're listening. and we want to know how we translate that into where we propose, manager proposes to spend the county's dollar to achieve that vision. Revenue diversification is important for two reasons. One, of course, it safeguards during a downturn if you have lots of different revenue sources and one goes down because you have a diverse source, a diverse group of sources. That can be okay if you have one large concentrated revenue source. That's a risk exposure for us. In addition, when revenue sources are diverse, We make sure we're efficiently charging the taxpayer between taxes, user fees, and rates. We want to make sure we're not overcharging in one area and undercharging in another area. That leads to our transparency and to people trusting us more that they know that the way that they're being charged is efficient and fair. Intentional risk management, this is something that we probably don't talk about enough and I don't hear enough about it nationwide, but I am starting to hear about it more and more through our professional organization, Government Finance Officers Association. We're starting to talk really heavily about how we mitigate risk and when we do that and how we communicate it to you so that you can make informed decisions on when we take risks and when we don't. 20 years ago, we could buy an insurance policy and sort of transfer that risk to the private sector. That's not possible anymore, and during your June session, you'll be having some more conversations about risk, so I won't go on about it here. But risk is a topic we need to be talking about more and more, and talking about it collaboratively like this, so that we understand your expectations, and then we can move forward in that direction. And while we're doing these things, buying an insurance policy isn't a very flashy thing. The taxpayer doesn't see the immediate result of that. So we need to be transparent about why we're doing what we're doing, and we need to communicate. Normally, they say when you think you're communicated properly, you're about halfway there and you need to do it another halfway. So, in these regards, I can think of a few things that we're very proud of. Certainly, other departments have many things, but in the finance area, the transparency piece, we're very proud of the checkbook, which was released last spring and summer. And so, that is something that we've always had that information, we've always provided it to the taxpayer, but not overnight, not electronically, and not in a format that they can download, make PDFs, make Excel worksheets, you know, sort in any way that they wish, or look at it in a graphical format. So, we're very excited about that. In addition, communication. The budget 101 last summer, the weather was beautiful. I was concerned people wouldn't come. They did. The room was almost full, and it was very exciting, and we had a nice discussion. And we'll do that again this summer. Moving on again to financial strategy, I don't want to go through this whole chart. Laurie and I put this up here with the priority of telling you how critical it is that as you make these strategic decisions, there are 3,100 of us standing behind you to execute them. And I want to highlight two pieces of this and then let you peruse it at your leisure. On the upper left-hand corner, there's a note about strategic planning. That's this, that's the visioning, that's the high level, this is where we want to be in five years, in seven years, you know, that type of thing. And then if you look at the bottom right, that's what we do, and that's what our teams do, is execute the tactical pieces, the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly duties that allow us to reach those big goals that you have. But one thing that's really important about this chart is it shows that all of us are required, and all of us do participate in this, because this isn't just a finance framework. It may be a financial framework, but all departments have input. I'm thinking of the sanitation fund. you know, in setting those rates. I'm thinking of looking at the risk environment. I'm thinking about long-term unfunded liabilities that many departments may know about, and then they inform us and we work together. So this really is comprehensive. We all work on this with the goal of that upper left-hand corner, achieving your strategic vision. That's the most important thing. And I think maybe the most important part about what we're delivering is that the framework creates the discipline, because we know that you have many demands on you, that people want many more services with those finite resources. If we equip you with the proper resources and proper knowledge of the five-year forecast, it equips you to be able to say, yes, we can do that, no, we can't do that, but we can do this other thing that'll work. you know, X percentages as well. So that's really our goal is not to make those decisions but to equip you to do the great things that you've heard about today that you'll hear about in May and then you'll hear about again in June at different topics. I'm going to hand it over to Ms. Cook.

Ms. Hello. Good afternoon. Oh, yeah, you can hear me. Nice. Hear myself.

So, this is terrible. Glasses on, glasses off.

So when we start talking more tactical, technical, whichever verbiage you want to use, from GFOA we talk about these six elements of the budget bedrock. Again, these are not new concepts. They transform over time. Strategic planning, the county has had strategic plan for decades. It was interesting. It was funny, maybe funny, funny for me story is when prior prior prior county manager retired John Slaughter, who had been here for 35 years. And he used to be our strategic planning or strategic planner manager. came upstairs. He had his, his big whiteboard, whatever it was. Right. And he came up and it was the strategic plan. Initiatives are different. Focus areas are different. Milestones are different. Our population looks a little bit different. Um, but it was, you know what it is. Well, that's the intent, right? You don't want to take these very large objectives and goals and have to be changing them all the time. It's how you get there. How does that relate to what's going on in your community? Second is developing and you know just to go back that's what we're doing now right is updating the process based on input from Raftelis and then also just moving forward as normal updates to our strategic plan. Develop a service baseline. This is extremely important to understand those services that are provided and at what level. So we talk about this program but what does that program mean? What is that delivery schedule? We heard SHAN TALKED EARLIER, WE HAVE THIS, WE HAVE THIS AVAILABLE, WE HAVE IT AVAILABLE, WE HAVE STAFF AVAILABLE AT 10 O'CLOCK EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. SO THAT SERVICE BASELINE DEPARTMENTS ARE ACTUALLY WORKING ON PROVIDING SERVICE BASELINES WITHIN THE PARAMETERS OF THEIR CURRENT FUNDING SO WE ALREADY KNOW AND WE'VE HEARD THAT IT'S NOT NECESSARILY IDEAL FUNDING OR ENOUGH FUNDING I GUESS IS A BETTER TERM FOR IT BUT THAT IS AN ONGOING project ongoing whatever we're doing with it setting policy boundaries we have very robust financial policies we have that they're listed in the and I'm going to do a plug here so in the budget book so it's at the end it's like its own suction but policy boundaries and so those policies again if you have unless there's something major that changes those policies usually are not going to change a lot And there's a reason for that. So unless you have something that changes in best practice or something that changes from a board perspective, we have brought forward, for example, changes to fund balance policy or creating a fund balance policy. So I think it was last year, the health benefits fund with a fund balance policy. Part of that is, well, what do we do if it's high or higher than the policy? And what if it's lower, right? So it gives you some triggers and some definitions on what will happen in those situations. the setting boundaries with long term financial planning and forecasting. So now you have your policy boundaries and now you have that overlay. So from that matrix you have this overlay, long term financial planning and forecasting. developing the capacity for public engagement. So while public engagement is not new, per se, how we engage the public and what tools we have available, whether it's the frequency, whether it's the type, whether it's the, it's something that has always been a priority and it is, we want the public to be engaged. We want people to understand. The more understanding, the better. and then building networks with also organizations, right? So this is bedrock. I did not make this up to like tie to anything else that we've talked about today, but obviously none of us can do it alone. So there's very few things we do interdepartmentally within the county that is siloed per se or that we can be successful alone with an individual department. Likewise, it's the same thing when we talk about the county and our community and our community organizations. So these are, I'm not reading all of these, don't worry. But when we talk about our policies, these are the financial policies that are available. They're in the back of the budget book. But the ones that are highlighted are ones that we have that are specific and related to fiscal sustainability and to what happens with finances. So when we look at resource, sorry, I need to read from my notes here because I did not memorize all of these. Well if we look at resource allocation there's guidance around what the that what we're going to call excess excess resources outside so discretionary resources to be allocated per rate the board strategic priorities. We look at the annual operating budget. We have a policy that ongoing revenues support ongoing expenditures or vice versa. Ongoing expenditures are supported with ongoing revenues. Financial reserves, we have the fund balance policy which is 10 to 17% of unrestricted or unassigned and as well as the stabilization. So per statute we can have stabilization so we do have a minimum within the general fund for that stabilization for those financial reserves. And so we could talk, right, we have capital improvement fund and there's a lot of them that, again, we see these policies, well, they overlap when we, oops, excuse me, when we go back and we look at that matrix. So the upshot to this is that we do have financial policies, we have them available we can talk about them at some point in time or whatever we want to do with those but it's part of the bedrock right it's part of this foundation now what we do with that and how we move forward you know we have we have those discussions and then I think that's when I turn it to you because otherwise I'm taking over sorry testing okay

So just to round us out and anchor us, how do these guardrails help us achieve our vision? They work together as a framework. Every single thing that Ms. Cook and I have spoken about form together and form a framework. One policy on its own can't give you the guidance that you need to make the proper decision so that we're sustainable. You're delivering the service levels that you desire through us and So this is a framework for long-term decision-making, and the long-term forecast allows for you to know what's coming up so that you can say, okay, these are the five things we really want to execute during these three strategic discussions, and then we can go out and do, as I say, those tactical duties every day, week, month, year to achieve them. finite resources call for a disciplined approach we have to have discipline so that we're efficient and effective with the taxpayer dollar and it lets you know when you should expand when you should hold and when you should contract we also have key performance indicators and data measures so that you know this project is not as effective as we'd like it's it's 20 years old it's no longer needed let's put our resources into this other place that's our goal to set that those um those bedrocks as miss cook said so that you can make those decisions as effectively and efficiently and timely as possible. So to really round us out, this is we have a commitment to quality public service, has been said many times, and through the human resources discussion on hiring and retaining the best. We have a commitment to quality. We're here to serve the taxpayer, so we want to provide that quality service. We have commitment to dependability and continuity of service, so that is going to require us to have long-term vision long-term strategic plan, long-term financial foundation so that we can go and achieve your vision but have continuity of the bedrock and foundational services while we're doing it. I'm bringing the entire day together, if I may close us entirely out. There's amazing work underway. I've learned some things this morning, and so thank you for that. Diversion to services. This helps us provide services to our most vulnerable before they get into the justice system, which helps them and helps the county be as efficient as possible. Education as a diversion to services. Citizen self-service empowers the taxpayer and allows people to get what they need when they need it versus waiting to have to call us. And it educates people so that they have more choices and they can make the best choice. Reimagining county hiring and recruitment, of course, hiring and retaining the best and brightest so that we can serve the taxpayer as effectively and as efficiently as possible. And financial strategies, we can't do it without knowing what's as much as possible, knowing what's upcoming and how to handle the challenges. how to handle our upcoming financial forecast. And so next strategic stranding planning workshops, you'll see on May 19, we'll have growth, housing and infrastructure and June 2, county operations and risk. So with that, we'll answer any questions and thank you very much. Thank you. Any questions?

Questions? I have a question. Would you be so kind to remind us, because it's come up during presentations, about the national recognition that Washoe County has received In following GASB and following essentially all the required procedures that we are legally required to follow in terms of compliance, would you remind us what those awards are? And we've been receiving those awards for quite some time in that recognition. I just ask if you could remind us.

Sure thing. Thank you, Madam Chair. We received the annual comprehensive financial report award from the Government Finance Officers Association. That's the best practice format, and we present our financial statements in that format. And off the top of my head, I don't have... You might, but I don't have the number of years that we've received that award, but it is many years. It's over 30. Over 30 years.

I think that's important because the requirement of following, whether it's GAAP or GASB, depending on the applicability. Oh, excuse me, Madam Chair. Oh, go ahead.

We have our external auditors as well. They come in and they audit those financial statements, and then they make an opinion on those financial statements. And so we're not just preparing the financial statements, but then they're audited. In addition, we have, which Ms. Cook referred to a few moments ago, the Government Finance Officers Association has a best national practice budget award format. We have been presenting our budget in that format for, you probably know this better than I as well,

Our most recent acceptance or the award approval is 23, 24. There was one year we didn't submit. It was over the recession. There weren't enough finance staff to actually produce it. But every time it's been submitted, it's met the requirements and the criteria.

Well, I think it's worth bringing that recognition as we close in terms of some of the challenges that we have. Certainly, we all understand what those are. Again, I'm going to echo the thanks for everyone understanding that we are moving to a priority-based system and budgeting, and I think that that's really important because it is... going to help, I think, everyone to understand how we do actually look at priorities and how we stretch that dollar without compromising the services, the essential services that we are required to deliver and are expected. So, yes, Commissioner Clark.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My microphone's on. You know, I took a census when we first started the meeting this morning. We had 44 people in the room. Out of the 44 people, six of them were citizens. The rest of them were staff or electeds. And I thought it was just interesting. I think this is a very important meeting. I think there's a lot of information covered in three hours and seven minutes so far. And I think in the future we should find a way to get this message out to folks. So we either have folks here in the audience or folks watching online. So it's a lot of good information. People should understand what's taking place. And we've got a half a million people living here in the county. 44 in attendance and 38 of those were staff or electeds. Next, we talked about the upstream. I really appreciate that. I think that's so important. We should always be looking at how to head it off at the pass, how to catch something before it gets out of control. Mr. Gustafson talked about the wait list for homemakers, for seniors. I'd like to know how many people are on that wait list and how long it takes the wait list to come through for somebody to get some assistance. He also talked about about 100 people at the CARES campus at about $71 a day. That's $7,100 a day for the total. That's $213,000 a month and $2.5 million a year. So I think that's something that's a large number when you annualize that. And I think we should be looking at that. We've got a public information office here at the county. uh we should have press releases and and lots of notification when we're going to have this type of event through local media and make sure people understand that this is taking place and again they can they can watch it online so thank you and one last comment we've got 25 different departments The chair talked about sharing this at cab meetings and so forth. I think we should record each and every one of the department heads kind of record what these folks have said and just share those at cab meetings and have a video presentation of seven or eight minutes at the cab meetings to make the public aware of what the county departments really do here. I think that's a real good educational tool. Thank you.

Anything else? Well, I'll echo the thanks to everyone and I think we've all walked away with a lot of information and I hope it was helpful for everyone as well. A huge, huge thanks to all the staff that really make our county actually the best. And it's amazing to see the results of everyone's hard work. And so thanks to everyone. And if there isn't anything else, I just want to remind everyone that on May 19th, the theme is Final Budget Housing Infrastructure and Growth. And then on June 2nd, the theme is data governance and cybersecurity, which there's more to come on that. I've been a driving force on that, and the county manager has been kind enough to look at what those national expectations and standards and how we can prevent things from happening. Is there anything else that anybody else has anything to say? We're going to call for public comment at this time.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We're on our final public comment, and comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person, and it may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda. Please make your comments to the commission as a whole. Thank you.

First up, we have Terry Brooks, followed by Susan Walls.

Right over there.

Good afternoon, it's me Terry Brooks again. And today I feel the responsibilities to address discrimination against those who have disabilities. Some discriminators claim that those who lack certain abilities brought upon themselves their own disabilities. These discriminators focus way too much on other people's disabilities and do not focus near enough on such people's other abilities. When there are some people who lack some abilities, they automatically learn to depend more on all of their other abilities. If you see someone who cannot do something as well as you can, there's probably something else they can do a lot better than you can. When I hear someone who doesn't rhyme like me, they can probably do anything else a whole lot better than me. I will share a lot of my thoughts and make them loud and clear about discrimination against people who cannot hear. I have known a few people who are hearing impaired and I've seen the burdens that some of them have bared. I will be sharing a lot of thoughts that have come to mind about discrimination against people who are blind. I would like to be addressing some of the humilities experienced by some people with physical disabilities. And I'd like to address some of the humilities experienced by a lot of people with mental disabilities. In all these cases, it is not their fault, and so the discrimination against them must come to a halt. We must appreciate everyone for all that they can do and not discriminate against anyone for things you're not able to do. I would like to thank you all for listening to me today, and I look forward to coming back because I've got a lot more to say. Thank you.

Susan Walls. Hi, Susan Walls for the record. I usually come up here, thank you by the way, to the commission and to all the staff for everything that you do and for the session today. I usually come up with prepared comments when I do speak, but I don't have any today. I just found out about this meeting this morning and I almost didn't come. I probably didn't know about it because of my own neglect of looking through my email and knowing that this meeting was happening. But I'm a relative newcomer to Washoe County, and I feel that it's my responsibility to put myself in the way of education, which I feel that these meetings are part of that. And it's very much appreciated that the communication is there and the transparency is there to the extent that the Commission and all of the staff can provide that to us. There are many, many methods to communicate and knowing where to go to get that information and where to put yourself in the way of information is very important. So with that said, one of the things I want to be sure that we don't overlook is using our library resources to help with that. In addition to social media, the specific Washoe County website and subsites within Washoe County, the cabs, and of course for the city, the nabs. So anyway, please use the Washoe County Library as much as possible to help put that information in the way of myself and other individuals as well. Thank you. Thank you.

There's nobody else signed in. Thank you. Well, we'll go ahead and again, and thank you for being a great facilitator and helping to document everything. Thanks to the county manager. Thanks to staff. Thanks to everybody for attending. And I'm going to go ahead and close this meeting at 1215. Thank you.