Cumberland Commissioners Hear Oral Health, Suicide Prevention Reports

[0:02] Speaker A (unidentified): Yes, commissioner. [0:26] Speaker B (unidentified): Here, Mr. [0:28] Speaker C (unidentified): Chair Smith. Mr. Here. President. Hi. [1:27] Speaker D (unidentified): No, we have a couple of presentations this evening. The last 2 are, informational, the first two are presentations. I'd like to invite Public Health Director Liz Blackwell-Moore to the podium to kick off this first item concerning the Cumberland County School Oral Health Project, which the commissioners funded through the use of opera funds back four or five years ago. [2:20] Liz Blackwell-Moore: Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. You won't hear from me more than once tonight. But I'll just start by saying we're excited to have our partners in this project here today to share some more information with you. This project came really out of our county health improvement plan that we worked on in 2022 and the key goal that we identified was really a need to increase access for oral health care across Cumberland County. With ARPA funds we were able to fund a project that really built out an infrastructure to for school-based oral health care so I'd love to invite our partners in the project up we have Becca Matasovich from the Children's Oral Health Network of Maine and Michelle Mitchell is here from partnerships for health thank [3:08] Becca Matasovich: You and thanks everyone Becca Matasovich Children's Oral Health Network or we call it cone and I'm really happy to be here I think it was three and a half years ago actually that we stood before you and sort of proposed this project so I'm really excited to be back and be able to sort of report back on how it's gone and I'm just gonna for a few minutes just kind of explain what the project was all about and then Michelle who is our lead evaluator and data guru will come up and present more of The results so if you remember if you were here when we first proposed this project you know a big part of the problem coming out of the pandemic at access to dental care had gotten a lot worse and it wasn't great before as I'm sure many of you knew and if there are about 40 000 kids school-age kids in Cumberland County and we estimated based on claims data that someplace between 16 and 20 000 of those kids did not have a dental home at that time so nowhere to go for regular care and so that Was really the problem we were trying to get at, and there's a lot of reasons behind that, and I won't go into a lot of depth on them, but you know, obviously what kind of insurance you have, the workforce shortages that are still a problem, distance to dental offices, family logistics around transportation and getting to dental offices, lots of different challenges, and schools are a place where we can bring preventions, early identification, referral support to children where they're already spending their days. And so the goals of this project were to develop a coordinated and sustainable school-based oral health infrastructure that could really bring especially prevention and early intervention to schools to help meet those unmet needs for all kids around the county, making services available by reaching all public schools in the county and not just with fluoride varnish and screenings, which is what sort of the state program was set up to provide, but that's very minimal services, but by really building out more levels of full preventive care, early identification, carries treatment, sealants, cleanings, you know, all of the routine preventive dental care, and then connections to treatment in a dental office when it couldn't be provided on-site, and making that sort of, you know, all levels of care accessible to all students, available in all schools regardless of insurance, so the intervention that we were working on delivering here was not to set up a clinic but to build an infrastructure, a delivery system that had the ability to deliver those services in all schools across the county, and so this requires are pulling partners together, providing leadership and coordination to really develop a unified approach to this across the county, because there wasn't just one provider that could get involved, and different schools have different needs. We needed to build a workforce that's required more hygienists going into more schools, that requires equipment, and that's what actually a good part of the funding was spent on, sort of the equipment and building out the hygienist workforce to deliver services, setting up the data and also referral pathways and record sharing kind of infrastructure, and then really modeling out the costs and the potential revenue for this to make sure that what we're setting up isn't just going to stop when the grant funding ends at the end of this month that this is really a sustainable delivery system where these providers can continue to visit these schools continue to deliver these services after the project ends this month and they're all committed to doing so and so this was really a partnership cone was serving in sort of the coordination role convening all of the partners and providing leadership but Greater Portland Health and mainly teeth for the two providers that really stepped up and expanded their capacity to reach any school that was willing to partner on the project as soon as they were able to. And obviously, the public health department here was a key partner, the state Main CDC and the school oral health program at the state level, it was a very important partner, and Partnerships for Health for our evaluation, as well as obviously the schools that participated. So let's get to results. [7:52] Speaker A (unidentified): So I'm going to provide just a brief overview of the evaluation findings. We do have a report that's almost finalized, which you're happy to read whenever you feel like having some fun, and feel like knowing that we make a difference, because so much of the time we're in meetings, we're doing stuff, but it doesn't make a change. And this is a project that's been really great, because we've been able to see in three years, I can't tell you why I put one tripled, that there's 88 schools that could have these services, and by the end of the three years we had 69 acts of the providers of partnerships, and these take time, right, like it's engaged in superintendents and principals and school nurses, and 68 of the schools had at least one clinic. So big picture is we've got almost 1000 students who had access to services, we know from our modeling that the first time a provider is in a school the uptake is not as great, over time they get more well-known, everyone's you know knows it's a friendly face, more kids start going to you know going to access care, so the 68 schools, as time goes on, there'll be more kids going for the services. And that just shows the breakdown visually in a map by the different towns. We not only managed to get the breadth, so get into more schools, but also the depth. So the student visits in year three, which was school year ending now in June. June, so the 25-26, we had over 2,000 student visits in the 68 schools, two providers, and a lot of those we know prevention makes such a difference, fluoride varnish makes such a difference, so the fact that most of those school visits were fluoride varnish means we're doing a good job in terms of prevention. And the referral mix is where I think the hope comes in because we can see like two-thirds of the visits were healthy oral health. If those children can keep being healthy in the community, they don't need to go to a dentist to get urgent restorative care. So it just makes such a great case for prevention and even the non-urgent referrals and we'll see we've been modeling this and so we know when a clinic is held at a school more and more you're going to get children over time staying healthy, less referrals, less demand on the dental practices. It's where prevention works and we've done two courses as an infrastructure and we really were conscious of how do we make this move forward be sustainable and one of the things that providers want needed to know was will this work financially, will it make sense and so we've we've created the financial simulator. It allows you to do a lot of what-if planning scenarios. It's based in Excel, there's a whole lot of variables people can put in about which schools program uptake, maybe you have a 10% kids to uptake the program, maybe it's 20% and we're able to see at the end of that what is the bottom line for practices and this is just a snapshot of one of the case scenarios we did where we looked at foundational services which is what the school oral health program at Maine CDC provides, right, they your basic flora varnish basic education the just on that we can look at a net revenue of about fifty three thousand simply I'm saying simply because it's not a big workflow change but simply by adding SDF you can increase the net revenue by 99,000. That really speaks to dental practices. And as with any model, there's caveats and there's disclaimers. But it's a good predictor. And when we're wanting to get leadership buy-in, these financial simulators can be very helpful. The last thing we did was trying to make this case for prevention. And prevention is one of the hardest things to quantify, because how do you show what didn't happen, what didn't and cost, and this return on investments is a whole lot of things. But what we wanted to do is say if we have a decrease, if we have less decay, we have a less need for referral, we have less urgent care pressure, what will that look like over time? And we've got this trajectory model, we only have one years data in it at the moment, so part of what we're doing is looking at, we've worked with the main CDC continuously, been able to add data to it every year so that we'll be able to see over 10 years what costs are being avoided, and it really is what decay has been avoided. And this is just one of the examples of how we've used it, where we look at low poverty schools and high poverty schools. So this is just based on reduced school lunches. And we can see at the beginning the difference between a low poverty and a high poverty school, there's a big difference. That, we believe through our modeling, it's never gonna collapse, right? There's always gonna be a difference. But at least the higher poverty schools are catching up, and similar with the visits of untreated decay, the high poverty schools are starting at a higher level, they may always be at a slightly higher, but at least they're coming down, and the slope that they're coming down is actually greater than what the schools that are not high poverty schools are decreasing. So it's, it looks like, and we'll continue to add more data, that we're able to narrow the gaps. So just five things that made this all possible, the coordinated lead, I promise you Becca didn't pay me to say this, but without Cohen I don't think this would have happened. We get to evaluate so many different projects, I think having a coordination made a huge difference. There was also low barrier school participation. We didn't ask schools to sign away their firstborn. It was very simple. They, you know, it was conversations with the providers and the schools. They also a lot of provider capacity, particularly around equipment, training, professional development. Creating referral pathways has just, I think, will continue to be an issue in the health system about having referrals, closing loops, but we were able to particularly work with the school oral health program that I think will have good data for years to come. And then blending the finances, being able to use the grant funding as well as reimbursements, working with the practices on how they can get reimbursements. I think without looking at the financing part, we would have just all been doing good because we think it's the right thing to do. Looking at the financial also says that it's like it makes economic sense and that is us. Any hard questions Becca can answer? [17:00] Becca Matasovich: Yeah, great question. Actually, yes, there are programs and not necessarily just within this project, but statewide we have a number of other projects as well working on building some educational campaigns and other programs both for educating parents and for educating students as well as providers. And we still have a long way to go on that, but there it's definitely built into the visits that there's education happening and it was one of the things in the site visit that we had back in May. We had some groups of parents and students and school nurses who talked with all of us as sort of program folks and there were a couple of high school students involved in those conversations and they both like unprompted brought up that they felt like through having the care at school and having the opportunity to learn they had developed much better oral health habits themselves because it was they were more aware of it. They were learning both sort of in the appointments themselves, but then also feeling more inspired and motivated to sort of follow through on the behaviors and take care of their own on oral health, and that kids were talking to each other about it in ways that wasn't something that we had thought we could try to make happen. It just happened. So I think it's both an intended consequence and an unintended consequence. [18:44] Speaker A (unidentified): In year three, it was 2008, two more back. [18:49] Becca Matasovich: Yeah, the number of kids who had actual dental visits in school. Right, and then this is partly reflecting Michelle's point about how like in the first year the providers go to a school, even in the second year if the uptake can be low, like the number of families that sign up for the services usually takes a couple of years to really ramp up when people start trusting it and you have to stay the course because a lot of schools have had a lot of experiences with providers coming in and then disappearing when a grant ends and a lot of people don't feel like they Want dental care, you know, they have to really start to buy into it. A lot of people have fear of going to the dentist, and so families have to be willing to sign up for the services, and the school has to help sort of sell them, make the case for people to sign up for the services, and that can take a few years. And also people don't, you know, in the first couple years also the providers are still ramping up their capacity, so it can be hard for the providers and the school nurses to judge how many days do we schedule, you know, for you to be here before they know how many people are going to sign up. And so it just takes a couple years for it to like settle into a pattern, and so we're expecting like in year, in this coming school year that just started, I think we'll see those visits go up much higher. Right, yeah, but there's a long way to go. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, someplace, yeah, we said someplace between sixteen and twenty thousand, so we might be at about fifteen percent of the need, you know, by year three of this, and it's gonna take a while for it to grow. I do want to end on one little note of good news though. I mean, not only is this financially sustainable now, so the providers are going to continue going to these schools even without a major donor, I mean they're, they're both nonprofits and they're trying to raise money, so send the donors to them for sure, but also the state, we got a bill passed last session that provided some funding at the state level for the state to begin helping other counties also move in this direction, and we've also just gotten an award from the congressionally directed spending thanks to Susan Collins office that is going to help us purchase more equipment, you know, to help bring this to other counties as well. So Cumberland County is definitely sort of the, many other counties are jealous and are now starting to emulate what you guys have been able to pull off. Thank you very much. [22:58] Speaker D (unidentified): I will kick it off and just say that we've asked Liz to put together a small presentation on a report out around suicide prevention here in CUMLIN COUNTY. SEPTEMBER IS NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION MONTH AND WE WERE NOT IN THE POSITION OF GETTING A PROCLAMATION TOGETHER BUT WE FELT IT WAS THOUGH WOULD BE BENEFICIAL FOR THE COMMISSIONERS TO HEAR A QUICK PRESENTATION FROM THE PUBLIC HEALTH DIRECTOR ON THE SUICIDE RATES AND KIND OF COMMON OCCURRENCES OR REASONS BEHIND THOSE HERE IN CUMLIN COUNTY CLOSE TO THE HOME. And so Liz has been gracious enough to turn on a dime just in about the last week and a half and gather a bunch of data that she's going to present to us right now. So, Liz, thank you. I'm [23:57] Speaker G (unidentified): going to bring some together to come back on. Plug and unplug. How [24:49] Liz Blackwell-Moore: much better than visual aids for that copy? [25:51] Speaker H (unidentified): Grayson, the sheriff has three credit hours in IT. He's probably out. Is [26:31] Liz Blackwell-Moore: it my computer, do you think, or is it something else? [26:36] Speaker G (unidentified): Oh, okay. [26:37] Speaker I (unidentified): That makes me feel better. That's what I said today. [26:58] Speaker J (unidentified): Every time, you know, we'll [27:01] Speaker D (unidentified): suddenly take an issue out of it. [27:47] Speaker B (unidentified): We're not watching you, Bryson. No pressure at all. You can't play it. If you don't read something, you'll kick it. [27:57] Speaker I (unidentified): I guess I got short legs we're thinking about our dinner we had [28:01] Speaker C (unidentified): we started wondering where everything's located [28:05] Speaker K (unidentified): it's kind of like when you're on stage you can hit the pedal yeah exactly [28:13] Speaker D (unidentified): you could get it done so if we aren't recording it [28:28] Liz Blackwell-Moore: yeah sure it's it's going to be a little more boring I was going to share with you a little bit about what suicide looks like here in Maine. Also talk a little bit about the risk and protective factors, the things that put people at higher risk and the things that are protective of suicide, a few strategies that we can do for prevention and then of course some resources for folks to have and I also just want to say that we at Cumberland County Public Health we do not have direct funding to do suicide prevention work but I think you'll find and you'll hear in my in some of the things I share with you that there are a lot of overlaps between things that are protective and things that put someone at risk for suicide that are really similar to things that put someone at risk or protective for tobacco and substance use or we have some efforts that we do in the violence intervention partnership that are also can be preventative of suicide risk so we have some overlap and yet we do not necessarily direct funding for this project so I am thankful to be here to share with you some of the ways in which there are those overlaps so in terms of what it looks like here in Maine there into in 2025 there 283 people died by suicide in Maine now that suicide the rate of suicide death in Maine has increased by double in the last 20 years so in 20 in 2003 the suicide death rate was 11 per a hundred thousand people and in the most recent year 2025 it was 22 per 100,000 people. And that's actually a higher rate than the U.S. rate as well. The U.S. rate is 16 suicide deaths per 100,000 people. And suicide is the second leading cause of death among Maine residents ages 15 to 24. So this is a public health problem that actually does really require a public health response because suicide isn't caused by one single factor and suicide prevention will not be achieved by any single strategy or approach and that's a quote from the US CDC in 2022 and they were provided us action plan for communities to address suicide and you know because there are individual factors so things that are like genetics and what happens in your household and experiences that you have but there really are also factors and risks from the relationships people have so they have strong relationships or are they socially isolated community has a huge impact on suicide risk as do policies so some of the key risk factors for suicide at that individual level we know financial problems actually are a huge risk factor individual risk factor adverse childhood experiences which you might have heard of as there it's really childhood toxic stress that's caused by abuse neglect and household challenges that also put somebody at risk for suicide and we think about household challenges those may be things like a death of a parent by suicide puts that child at higher risk for later in life being a victim or a perpetrator of violence is a risk factor. In terms of relationships, being bullied and being discriminated against puts people at higher risk, having violent relationships or being socially isolated. At that community level, not having access to health care is a risk factor or being in a community in which there's a lot of violence. At the societal level, having access to lethal means, meaning like having a firearm when you're already at risk puts you at higher risk than of suicide death. In terms of protective factors, there are many things that help protect people from being at risk. And those are things like number one, economic stability. It really is a key protective factor. Having effective coping and problem solving skills, feeling culture, identifying strongly with a cultural identity is also protective. Having support from your family and friends and parents and feeling connected to others. That community level, feeling connected to the community, to your school, to clubs and things in your life. Having consistent and high quality health care, physical and behavioral health care, is really protective. Protective, and then obviously reduced access to lethal means like firearms for folks who are at risk. So one of the things we see is that there are different groups of people. So it might be a difference, you know, there's men and women, there's girls and boys, there's folks who identify as LGBTQ+, there's people who've had lots of toxic stress in their life, there are people with low incomes. Those different groups all have different risk and protective factors. And those different risk and protective factors mean that our outcomes look different for those groups of people. So at Cumberland County Public Health we had the opportunity to take the main integrated youth health survey data from 2025 and we had it analyzed by epidemiologists looking at those different groups to see what are the differences in risk and protective, who does have more risk and who is at greater, who it does have higher rates of suicide ideation. And what we found, you can't see this beautiful graph that we have, but you'll see it in the future. We found that girls are almost twice as likely to consider suicide in the past year. People who identify as multiracial are almost twice as likely to have considered suicide in the last year than those who are white. Folks who are LGBTQ plus are three times as likely to have considered suicide and those who have that toxic stress as children so four or more adverse childhood experiences they're almost five times as likely to consider suicide. So in terms of the things we know that impact how, what is the strongest impact in terms of risk and protective factors, we also looked at that data from the level of young people and bullying has an incredibly strong impact, negative impact on suicide ideation and things like family support and feeling connected to community and teacher support are really protective. So this is when we ran like everything through these models we found those are the things that for young people are the things that the things we kind of have some level of influence over that we could be doing to support young people. In terms of the national CDC, the prevention strategies and approaches that are their kind of list of seven. Number one is to strengthen economic supports. So we just know that improving household financial security has a real impact on suicide. Number two, creating protective environments. So reducing access to firearms for people who are at risk of suicide or perpetrating violence, improving access and delivery to suicide care, so increasing behavioral health in rural areas would be an example of an approach. Promoting healthy connections, so an example of this could be preventing bullying [36:35] Speaker G (unidentified): and really preventing discrimination. Number [36:39] Liz Blackwell-Moore: five is teaching coping and problem solving skills, so you know when we teach social emotional learning programs in schools, that's suicide prevention work. Identifying and support people who are at risk, and then lessen harms and preventing future risks, so intervening after a suicide, we call that postvention. So those are all the national prevention strategies, and of course some of these things we've incorporated into our work and some, you know, are the work of our whole community that we have to really look at and think about as a full community. There are some great suicide prevention resources available. If you go to the main CDC website, you can find them there, but they're, I'd say for individuals and families who are concerned about themselves or a loved one, calling or texting 988 is kind of the first go-to line of defense. For young people, teens and young adults, they can call NAMI, which is the National Association of Mental Illness, and that they can text or call 1-800-950-NAMI. And then the Trevor Project is really specific for LGBTQ plus young people who are under the age of 25, and that you can text the word start to 678678, and then in terms of Maine prevention has prevention materials and campaigns. For adults it's heretohelpmaine.com, and for youth and young adults the website is filteroutthenoise.com, and there's like an amazing amount of resources available to folks on those two web pages. So thank you for your time, and I'm happy to take any questions that you might have. [44:09] Speaker C (unidentified): This item is being brought to the board to recognize October as Domestic Violence Action Month. In your practice, you can invite as many people as you can to play with your friends. I [46:48] Speaker G (unidentified): appreciate that. First, I just want to thank the commissioners and the Cumberland County administration and all of the Cumberland County employees who every year and every day do a lot to support domestic violence survivors here in Cumberland County and are part of the community that helps to make things better for survivors. So I appreciate you not just in supporting this domestic violence action month, but all of the actions that you all do and that our violence intervention partnership does to help to build that community, and that community support is very important. I do have some purple ribbon pins, and I know that one of your handouts have included some events that were happening throughout the county for domestic violence action month. One of them is the wear purple day on Thursday, October 22nd, and Through These Doors is also hosting an event that evening. I have some hard copies of the events if anyone wants them, but they are in your handouts, and also they encourage people to follow their social media to see where the different events are taking place. One of them is a lavender, they say the lavender cafe, this coffee by design will have a lavender latte, and part of the proceeds will go to the domestic violence resource centers here, or resource center, Through These Doors, in Cumberland County. I wanted to share with you, last year when you invited me here, we did the proclamation in October. We did a little earlier this year because of the timing of your commissioners meeting, and last year when I came, I shared what our goals were for our grant. We had received the grant in fiscal year 24, and it started in December of 2024. It's a three-year grant, so we're halfway through now, and wanted to share about the work that we did in fiscal year 24. the violence intervention partnership in general is really to focus on our grant focuses on the criminal and civil legal systems and coordination of those systems throughout the county but it really relies on the community partnerships it's such a strong part of it this first picture shows through these stores at the State House for domestic violence day at the State House and also some of our Cumberland County staff for this was actually sexual assault awareness month so we have people who Will participate here throughout the county for lots of different things and lots of different ways. One of our goals for this grant was is to increase survivor safety and offender accountability, and through a lot of coordination of different teams and multidisciplinary supports, I want to highlight a few of them. There was a new justice system involves survivors safety team, which is a multidisciplinary team led by Through These Doors that really focuses on people who have very high risk needs. That are they themselves survivors and engage in the criminal legal system. There's a higher risk for those individuals and a higher risk for figuring out their safety when they are moving on from the criminal legal system. In addition to the survivor safety team, the county has been supported for years the Through These Doors work in Cumberland County Jail with a safe reentry project to be able to offer support services to survivors of domestic and sexual abuse who are incarcerated. So some of the other things the safety fund is something that supports individualized safety needs. I think you all are familiar, you had supported this in the past through other projects, but this is supported partly through our grant. It meets individualized needs such as helping people get locks or cameras for safety purposes and may in certain circumstances help people with access to moving to a safe location and a variety of different other things. Our court coordination team advisory team focuses on the criminal and civil courts that are specific to domestic violence and sexual abuse. For the criminal court its judicial monitoring and for the civil court its protection order court, and our team has really worked with the administrative office of the courts to help implement a few different things we One, they've implemented some of the statewide best practices that we have talked to them about and supported. And we highlighted a concern regarding one of the protection order court forms. And since then, they improved the clarity of that specific form. We also had a multidisciplinary team training on enhancing safety and access for all survivors. And this multidisciplinary team is a whole variety of people. It's prosecutors, defense attorneys. It's community-based advocates, it's legal community advocates and attorneys and quite a few other people that work in the judicial system. So it's quite a big coordination that's a little bit separate from some of the other work. NAEP pretrial services also has a specialized supervisor for domestic and sexual abuse cases, and in this past fiscal year supervised 115 individuals with over 2,900 contacts for those individuals. One of the other groups that we have is a response team that talks case-specific coordination for cases that are high risk for lethality. Another one of our grant goals this time was to improve our response to sexual abuse, and we have done that in a variety of different ways, but a couple of the ones that I wanted to highlight was a newly engaged sexual assault response team. Again, it's another multidisciplinary team that is looking at some systems gaps and really trying to incorporate feedback from people who have lived experience, so listening to the survivors who have experienced those systems and working to enhance it. We've had some great opportunities through our federal grant funding to be able to send teams to a bunch of different national trainings to help them enhance local best practices and really think about different strategies that are happening across the country and how we can incorporate those into our strategies here in Cumberland County. We also have a specialized outreach advocate at sexual assault response services of Souther Vane who part of their work is to engage in specific community events to work with underserved populations or communities who might not be aware of how to access or what their services are, and it directly resulted in increased calls from service from those communities after attending different events. Language access is one of our goals for domestic and sexual assault services. This first square is calendar year. I kept track that way because of the difference of the county's fiscal year, the community-based organization's fiscal year, and the reporting cycle for federally funded or all different. So I kept track of the calendar year and from 2022 to 2025 this year from January to June, 302 sessions that we have worked on is just different training policies and best practices around like supporting sessions or training sessions for 590 different attendees. You can see all of the different variety of topics over on the right side of the screen. And overwhelmingly, anyone who attends one of our training sessions have said that they felt like it will help them better serve survivors of domestic and sexual abuse from the information that they learned at the training. Lastly, just our community connections within the Violence Intervention Partnership and in this book are so important to be connected to different organizations throughout the community. Community. We partnered this past year with the University of Southern Maine to host our [55:33] Speaker C (unidentified): speaker, Dr. Nyango, and [55:38] Speaker G (unidentified): now she's present at USM. She came to one of our intervention partnership meetings and talked about some similarities and differences between [55:47] Speaker I (unidentified): her community response and our community response. [55:52] Speaker G (unidentified): She is a nurse, a doctor, an activist activists in Uganda and came and shared some cross-collaboration with our partnership here. We partnered with the United Smaller Women of Maine, I'm sorry, the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine on providing education and training to the courts around access and limitations and supports for individuals. This picture up on the top right hand corner is our public health team last year at domestic violence action month and the last thing I wanted to highlight and for this picture is some of the safe reentry work that we've been doing here not all the safe reentry work is necessarily under the grant funding but the county has been supporting the safe reentry work in the jail and it's been nationally recognized through these doors and main pretrial services have been part of the safety and justice challenge and our team was invited to a national convening with national experts of which the people here in Cumberland County are considered in high regard as one of the national experts in the safe pantry work so I wanted to highlight that because that is part of our overall collaboration and support for individuals here in Cumberland County that's THAT'S ALL I HAVE FOR NOW. ANY QUESTIONS? SO THERE ACTUALLY WERE QUITE A FEW COMMUNITY EDUCATION PROGRAMS THROUGHOUT THE SCHOOLS. MY UNDERSTANDING AT THE MOMENT THAT THE DOMESTIC AND SEXUAL ABUSE RESOURCE CENTERS, I DON'T BELIEVE THEY HAVE THE CAPACITY TO DO THAT PROGRAMMING AT THE MOMENT. SO AS FAR AS THE YOUTH EDUCATION, I THINK RIGHT NOW THAT'S ON PAUSE, AND THEY'RE WORKING ON TRYING TO SECURE SOME ADDITIONAL FUNDING FOR THAT. THAT'S NOT PART OF THE FUNDING THAT WE HAVE HERE. And again, it comes down to funding and capacity to be able to maintain the program. As far as the domestic violence education programs, there are certified domestic violence intervention programs throughout the state. Through these doors has one, it's called a Different Choice here in Cumberland County, and that's for people who have caused harm to other people can attend those meetings and learn information about how to make different choices. I will take that, but it's not me, it's our community partners, really, that are the leaders in this work, but thank you. [59:24] Speaker D (unidentified): In favor? Next. This item is brought forth before the commissioners. This is the FY25. [1:00:09] Speaker H (unidentified): A few kind of updates, as Manager Gailey said, this is kind of an annual thing, so you're all at least passably familiar with it, but I'll kind of give you the really quick rundown. The homeland security grant fund is specifically designed for to provide training equipment things related into the prevention of terrorism. Every year we receive far more applications for funding than there is funding available, so it's it's a very critical need. This year we're accepting four hundred and eleven thousand dollars. Last year was about five hundred ninety thousand, and you might be wondering how dare you show his face here after getting less money, but this is actually the first tranche, and there's gonna be a second tranche of money coming in later. I suspect, although I don't have the, you know, I don't have the crystal ball, I think the number will actually see with all two together could be just over 700,000 here. It takes so we're actually pulling in slightly more than previous years. This year's application period was actually about a year ago, and then this, the award letter for this you'd normally have signed about this time last year, but this was very delayed by multiple government shutdown plus a lot of lawsuits related security terms and conditions and that sort of stuff. So unlike the normal grade year where three years to spend, this year we've actually been burning time on the federal side, and we only have two years. So what we did in soliciting applications this year for This year was, we actually front-loaded a lot of different counting projects because we suspected some of the towns would not be able or want to sign those DHS terms and conditions because of all the ambiguity of the time. So as a result, if you look at the eight projects in this one, only two of them are actually going to different towns and six of them are actually county projects, which is pretty rare. Typically we get, we use the county EMA typically gets either nothing or maybe 30, 40 grand. Someone like the sheriff's office one year, the sheriff's office got a great deal, next year they might not, so it tends to vary a lot. But this is a particularly strange year in that the vast bulk of the funds actually goes to the county organization itself. Barring that, we have some security improvements up in the town of Bridgeton. We have some money that will improve communications here in our EOC on the second floor. We have an antenna on the roof of this building and we have all of our radio equipment in the EOC so we can listen in on any radio traffic and those two aren't connected by anything. So this funding will be used to run a cable to actually connect those and then our communications room will be up and running. We have funding that goes go into county I.T. to improve communications and sheriff's office vehicles, some funding related to the security improvements of this building, some deployable crash barricades. These are something we will loan out to events like the Cumberland County Fair, Casco Days, Clam Fest, all those sorts of things, and you can set them up to prevent cars from ramming into crowds, so that'll be a really good one. Satellite communications and a command vehicle, some similar communication stuff for Casco Fire Department vehicles, and then funding to EMA to purchase a communications vehicle. And what that is, that's actually the replacement of our communications trailer which is at its end of life. So if you've ever gone up to dispatch on the left side, all those trailers, one of the really big one is a communications trailer. Rather than go the trailer route, we're going to just make it an actual vehicle that can self-propel itself and take all the stuff in that communications trailer and move it into that, so there's essentially a replacement of that. Otherwise, I'm happy to answer any questions about the projects, the process, anything you've got. Thank [1:05:20] Speaker D (unidentified): You this side is being brought forward for an awarded bid for some work on the floor down to jail, particularly the b3 ball pod has had some issues with deterioration of the floor and pieces of satin to pull up. That's not a good item, good thing to have. The facilities department, they had mandatory walk through, they had three vendors. [1:06:12] Speaker C (unidentified): 6 25. [1:06:45] Speaker J (unidentified): I appreciate it, I this is well needed and a long time coming, so I'm just glad to see it going through it. [1:06:58] Speaker B (unidentified): Despite my concern about the $0.25 here, I will second her. [1:07:50] Speaker D (unidentified): This item came out six months ago, quite an extensive program and this is kind of the first thing I've been talking about. [1:08:49] Speaker K (unidentified): So, to give you background, the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office requested the county commissioners authorize the purchase of the Celebrite digital intelligence software, hardware, and associated training for the total cost of $432,298. Over a five-year term and authorized the county to enter into the associated quote incorporated license terms with celebrate the Sheriff's Office serves as the statewide investigative hub for the main multi multidisciplinary trafficking response initiative, which is what we're calling this group that we're moving forward with. It's a five-year statewide effort to institution institutionalize a coordinated survivor centered response to all forms of human trafficking with a primary focus on labor. Trafficking and severe forms of labor exploitation in Maine. Through its participation in this group, the Sheriff's Office is working with Pebble Street and other law enforcement community partners to strengthen Maine's response to human trafficking. The initiative is supported by funding from Howard Buffett Foundation as intended to improve the identification, investigation, and prosecution of human trafficking while supporting survivor centered trauma -informed approach. A critical component of these investigations is the ability to identify, preserve, and analyze digital evidence. Keep trafficking investigations frequently involve evidence contained on mobile phones and other electronic devices, including text messages, communications, location information, financial transactions, photographs, and other digital records that can help establish relationships, patterns of control, financial exploitation. We are seeking to authorize the purchase and in turn to the agreement to celebrate with digital intelligence software, which will give the Sheriff's Office the capability to forensically extract and analyze digital evidence obtained during these authorized investigations. This capability will support investigators in developing objective evidence that can corroborate witness and survivor accounts and may reduce the need to rely solely on repeated interviews with trafficking survivors. The proposed purchase also supports the MBI's or the group's broader multi-agency approach. The Sheriff's Office anticipates using its digital intelligence capabilities to assist municipal, state, federal law enforcement partners in these investigations. We will identify connections between cases and individuals across jurisdictions and standardized digital forensics capability that can be incorporated into trafficking investigations, evidence protocols, and grant reporting. The 100% grant funded, this would be a 100% grant funded by the Howard Buffett Foundation. It's a subaward of Preble Street, which is the lead grantee of the Howard Buffett Foundation. As such, the county receives funding from Preble Street on a reimbursement basis and is award these funds for a five-year period. Table below outlines the year over year over year costs for the celebrate purchase, which will come out of the approved Buffett grant budget. The numbers are here. I'm not sure if you guys got the handouts. Okay, this equipment is sole source as far as celebrates capabilities. They are the leader in all these type of products. They're the only ones that are able to do this with the exception of another company called Magnet slash GrayKey. They do some similar things, but we're also getting that as a part of this. So there's there's nobody to solicit or procure quotes from because they're standalone companies and we're getting them both. So based on that, I would respectfully ask the commissioners to approve this request. Well, it's a unique opportunity because we are the law enforcement representative that's spearheading this. But the idea is we identify human trafficking cases and support other agencies that may not have the intelligence capabilities to forward their investigations. So they will send us information that they need analyzed, or suspects or vehicles and things like that. We'll be able to work those things and coordinate that. The human trafficking information that we've offered will provide to us on a national basis. So we're working to identify human trafficking organizations, and to do that we need to partner with our law enforcement agencies and other agencies throughout the state. So yes, that will be the tip of the spear for this project as it relates to the whole state. Yeah, and we will be the resource for that. It's a, it's exciting opportunity for us to be able to get into this area that's never really been pulled apart and looked at the way we're going to be doing this. So we're looking forward to getting up and running the process to, you know, getting all these things is happening. So that's also great. We're all looking forward to getting it up and running. We're already getting tips, we're already getting cases related to human trafficking sent to us so which indicates that we're gonna have, we're gonna be successful in our efforts. Well, the grant allows for the hiring of a criminal intelligence full-time. That person will be able to use all these products and all this equipment, as well as a criminal or criminal analyst that we have, which was previously with the MIAC. And she is also very familiar with all the research tools. We'll have a digital forensics examiner from within that will be able to be trained to download all these devices and allow detectives to analyze the information to further their investigations. We have nothing to do with the federal program. Would we ever interact with the federal government? Yes. In our investigations, yes, certainly. If we, if we find an interstate situation or international or whatever where this leads, there's indications that both are in play so far. So we would partner with anybody that could help us further our efforts. Yep, well at that point, you know, depending on how the success of it, things like that, we either find different funding sources or we have to reevaluate the plan to see the team, to see if it's within the county's capabilities to keep it continuing. But it's a five-year grant. Well, it was all listed in the initial proposal and the agreement, every dollar and every purchase. These are all things that they've identified through their other initiatives throughout the country as the best products to accomplish the goals, so they vetted that through, and then these happen to be a sole source provider. Other items that were within the budget we're trying to work through how we're gonna go through forward with that, so next month I'll be coming back to you again. I know it's magnet great thing, that's another, I don't even know where magnet great key is, I'm sure it's probably international, but they don't know their competitors in some regards, they have different capabilities and they kind of mesh together in certain areas, so you can take it so far with celebrate and enter into magnet okay, and then you can take their information further, and the opposite is true for both, you can take some stuff from magnet and put it into celebrate and you can use that information, so they don't, you know, they're not the same company, but they developed software and coordinated efforts, yeah. [1:23:20] Speaker C (unidentified): by the state legislature in terms of the process. It [1:24:28] Speaker B (unidentified): is a performance and my last understanding is that the City of Portland volunteers for some pieces of ticket prices, people's contributions to this operation. [Speaker C (unidentified): The] other thing is that we have a committee that's a seed, I guess, which is in New York City, trying to find what could happen next, which addresses really the upswing in people's interest in sports, local sports, as opposed to the perennial sports contemplation of the boston red sox, and that doesn't have to be in portland. The day after it was announced it cost me three tickets, i've seen it three times, i didn't see it this last year, thank [1:30:22] Speaker D (unidentified): you [1:32:32] Speaker C (unidentified): very [1:32:46] Speaker B (unidentified): much for the summary. Any commissions, any questions? [1:36:30] Speaker D (unidentified): Thank you. What an exciting time to record the CAPER and spend through the CDBG. Thank [1:36:56] Speaker B (unidentified): you. So [1:36:59] Speaker I (unidentified): each September the CAPER gets submitted to CLUD and that gathers accomplishment data based on the goals that were put in. Oops, sorry, I have the wrong screen. So the CAPER summary is, it's based on the five-year consolidated plan, And then it also reviews the action plans that for the previous year, So it's a little bit of goals for the overall and then what we just completed. [1:38:15] Speaker C (unidentified): The sheriff is still here. So [1:38:44] Speaker I (unidentified): The Community Development Block Grant serves the entire county except for Portland and Brunswick. Portland has their own set-aside, and Brunswick participates in the state program, and then South Portland and Bridgeton have their set-aside that is a portion of the county funds. This last program year, it was a little over 1.5 million that came to the county, and that was split out between about 900,000 to county, 415 to South Portland, and then Bridgeton was about 187,000. Some highlights from this previous program year, we spent about one point, almost 1.2 million that was from the within the program year, some of that is old funds as well. The last program year was about one point, a little over 1.5 million, seems to be kind of in every other year with the weather and what construction projects are able to get completed when they're outside. And so Alpha 1 installed 17 critical access ramps in homes of elderly and disabled county residents, and they are already knocking on the door to get with this year's program funds ready to go with their next batch of those. 426 victims of domestic violence receive safe and confidential services. This is about 200 more than what we recorded last program year here. 190 seniors were delivered weekly meals to their homes. This is the numbers that were only for July or September because they spend their dollars so quickly, and that money goes strictly to food purchasing for those deliveries. 335 households received assistance finding or moving into permanent housing. This is through different navigation plans within Bridgeton, South Portland, and Westbrook. 179 individuals received assistance and referrals TO RESOURCES SUCH AS FUEL ASSISTANCE, SHELTER REFERRALS, CODELY SERVICES, AGAIN, THAT TAPS INTO THE DIFFERENT NAVIGATORS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY. AND 362 TEENS RECEIVED NO COST PROGRAMMING AND OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE YOUTH OUTCOME. THIS WAS AT THE ONE PLACE TEEN CENTER. This number is July through March, so I'm sure that number is much higher, and the duplicated number is an extremely high number, they are there regularly, and it's quite a lovely place with a lot of opportunities there. So one of the projects that we funded this last year was childcare job creation, they have since hired 18 people so far at this new childcare facility in Freeport. They have hired 18 moderate income folks, and they have also opened the doors, and the priority is to have those low income families have their children go there. Right now they are still working on getting the final things wrapped up, but it is fully open and functioning right now. They did just say that the Y in Freeport is closing, or some of their programs closing, so they have a lot of applications coming in, not only for employment for or but for kids as well to join that child care. So the Westbrook has a community center, it's within the church. They had to redo a ramp that was rotting and deteriorating, and that was the only ADA accessible entrance into this building, and they were, they've now created an ADA accessible bathroom. Previously you could not fit a wheelchair through that door. It was quite an unfortunate and embarrassing situation if you had to use the facilities. It was a big production to make sure that nobody came down the hallway, and they're in the process of doing the downstairs bathroom now as well, so there would be one upstairs and downstairs. So this was huge for them, and there's, there's two upstairs now. South Portland, this is the before photos of the Pleasantdale playground. There was no park within walking distance in this neighborhood, so they were able to clear this out with some city funds and install an accessible playground for that neighborhood. There was recently an article in the Portland Press Herald. Some families were interviewed because it was, they were waiting and waiting for it to open, and they'll come back later on in the fall to install a safety fence and finish the plantings and to give it a little bit of a facelift on the, on the grass and stuff. So this was a, this was a really great project. Some other projects that have not crossed the finish line that we funded last year is the Forbes Lane pocket park in Wyndham. They did a lot of work with actually bringing the community in to do meetings for all of those that lived in that neighborhood to get input on what they would like to see at the park, what is it that those in the neighborhood are really going to be using. So it was a long process to truly involve the community to have input on this. So they landed on not bringing the typical playground structures, it gives that more of a natural look, and they're going to have picnic tables that will be cemented into the ground in a shed so that if you want to have birthday parties There you're able to access all of that so that they're getting the deliveries in of the equipment so that's going to be getting finished soon as well. Something else that was not included because I don't have pictures of the individual homes but Habitat for Humanity just in the last week I've been sent over 15 new homes to rehab just within the last week or two and they are continuously rolling those out. It's been a lot of grooves and now you have to do radon testing in order to do rehab in homes so that has in turn had some radon systems installed in these homes to keep those and it's been a huge in the Cumberland County to keep those elderly it's primarily other people to age in place in their own home [1:45:35] Speaker C (unidentified): Yes thank [1:46:03] Speaker J (unidentified): you so on Saturday we had a another corrections officer allegedly locked up Keep in track. It's five. The last four have been individuals that are in the asylee process and working. A little disappointing. I can't tell you right now the jury's out whether or not he's locked up or not. The press herald suggests that he's not. That he has to turn himself in tomorrow at 12. And I also heard that from somebody was down there on Saturday. But indications are he was told to take his kids home and come back, and he's locked up. We're not talking about the worst of the worst here. We're talking about people that are working really, hard and trying to keep the jail open, quite frankly. I'm not impressed. As a law enforcement officer, I'm embarrassed to say that 's a law enforcement agency. They do, they are a legitimate agency. They have a legitimate task but their priorities are a little messed up so my guess is that this guy will be you know out of commission for a couple weeks we'll bring him back like the others do an internal affairs investigation because that policy says if you're ever arrested we want to make sure that you didn't violate any state and federal laws the last one that was picked up came in the first day he could met with me and you know comments like you know some of my colleagues are in the in the gun sights of ICE and it's kind of despicable but unfortunately that's the game that they're playing so what I've seen is some pretty professional people that have gone through this and they God bless them, because I'm not sure that I would have that same attitude. And I would just end on, there are people that say that these folks are taking the jobs. And you know what, I got plenty of jobs. So anyone out there that feels like these folks are taking the jobs of locals, come on down, I'll put you to work. And we gotta find a pathway for those who are paying into the system and doing the right thing and trying to support their families. So that's where we are in that. I'm not sure where we'll stand when this guy gets out. As far as I'm concerned, we'll re-employ him because he has not done anything that, you know, unfortunately the way the law is written is that even in the asylum process, which is a complete legal process and ICE is not supposed to mess with them, they have the authority to mess with them. And that's what they're doing. So I'll answer any questions on that, and then I'll move on to. The reality is judicial warrants really don't exist. The only time a judicial warrant exists is if somebody was removed from the country and they come back in. That ups the ante to what I call criminal. This guy, it's a civil violation if there's any violation whatsoever and you know as I told somebody the other day we've got 25 27 of these folks that are potentially in the asylum process if it's an issue with misspelling their name or not checking the right box quite frankly all ZEISS has to do or be a problem solver here is call me up and we'll set up a meeting with all these folks and well I'll bring them together and get them in the same room and we'll fix the problem and if there's a court date needed because keep in mind all of these folks get a court date two or three years down the road so the wheels of the immigration justice doesn't move too quickly I'll make sure they get the court but instead we're taking them away from working 80 hours a week to support their family and much like we were collecting they're paying some jail to house them just to show them that vice can do that but the bottom line is they're they're threatening the last guy was told that there was a warrant for his arrest and the officer said well I want to see it you'll see it when you get back to the office in Scarborough he never was shown the warrant. Why? Because there was no warrant. This last guy was called and told, show up or we'll get a warrant for your arrest. So what do you do if you're in a new country and you don't understand the law and stuff? You grab the kids because you're babysitting, you get out into the ICE facility and they tell you take the kids back because you're not going home type thing. So they throw the warrant thing around but the ethical issues that I'm seeing goes back to I'm embarrassed for law enforcement that they are considered law enforcement just some of them because every agency has them but this is not a great time for what we're seeing no [Speaker C (unidentified): so I] got I spent the afternoon writing a letter to the congressional delegates in wrong form so i might have to tone it down a bit you know it's it's retribution right you know it goes back to and as i tell people a year ago i was dodging eggs and tomatoes defending this group and the fact that what we were told is they're going to walk down the borders and get the worst of the worst on the street i get on that I don't regret calling out like I saw it and quite frankly I'm still calling out like I see it. It's an embarrassment for professional law enforcement. So my whole thing has been that we're still holding U.S. martial inmates and there was a fear over the weekend that some of these folks might not come in because they were fearful to leave their house right. Thankfully they did the right thing or the right thing for us I don't know if it's the right thing for them but I mean if I lose too many of these folks the first group of people that go out the door the people I don't have to hold and that's U.S. Marshall in this so in my letter I point that out that one federal law enforcement agency is really messing it up for the rest of the federal law enforcement agencies that sometimes roll their eyes when that three-letter word ICE comes up. So along my saying, I'm working on something because it's real clear. It always happens on a Saturday when nobody's around. There's a lot of commonalities, and I'm looking into those commonalities, and I'll leave it at that. It wouldn't hurt, it wouldn't hurt. right I mean you know yeah I mean you know yeah yes [1:56:48] Speaker B (unidentified): I just want to say, first of all, I kind of have to tell, because it does seem like there's not a lot of attention to that little corner of the lawn at the county field. But I think about the fact that there is a huge quota that public safety officials to be executed by. If Maine is not going to be fighting, we don't, if we start with the Southern Police Department, that's where our responsibilities were. I [2:00:21] Speaker C (unidentified): appreciate the [2:00:25] Speaker J (unidentified): comments. I will say that in law enforcement, voter systems are bad. It creates unethical decision-making. It creates people doing things that they would not normally do to keep the job. You know, privately there are people that work for DHHS, DHS I should say, that they don't like it either. You know, but they go to work every day because they have an individual in the White House, not the president, who in my opinion is a white supremacists calling the shots creating the quotas and they're grabbing wool hanging through and again you know there's all in my operation and quite frankly like i said these folks were the ones that were doing a service with them a year ago so they got short memories so I will, like I said, I'm out the next two days, but, you know, I do the 24 hours and try to read it over and tone it down a bit. Then I'll, you know, I don't think there's any huge hurry. I will say the last guy, I meant to say this earlier, the last corrections officer is brought in front of the immigration judge. The immigration judge looked at the ICE officer and asked, why is he here in court? and then was given a $2,500 bond, which some of my staff have paid $10,000, some have paid $7,500. I mean, these are bonds that I've seen less for an individual we've arrested for a sexual assault case or something. And I guess the benefit of this is I've learned a little bit about immigration law through some contacts, but this is the fleecing of these folks too because sometimes they don't get that $10,000 back you know again this is this is a law that operates outside of anything that we're familiar with so anyway that's for that unless there's any other questions. A couple other things and then I [Speaker C (unidentified): appreciate it.] On to happier things. We started a JOK9 program a couple months ago. It took us 26 years to do it. I know when I got promoted into administration that was one of my first tasks and 26 years later we've got a lab inside the jail we got a grant for. He's in training and we've got a really dedicated individual, you know, it's going to be trained to detect drugs and just be constantly in the gym, so and that parlays into a law enforcement comment that we're lucky enough to have one of the, I call him the dog whisperer, but we've got a dog trainer that in his spare time runs a canine training group out of Standish and he's got about 50 teams throughout the state of Maine that, you know, he's the lead trainer but he's got other trainers that are canines he has brought the canine program, in my opinion, into the 21st century. We've got dogs that really know their stuff. They're making a lot of fines, whether it's missing persons or suspects and stuff like that. I honestly say the first 20 years of my career we had canines and they were pretty good at demonstrations but they weren't so hot and actually doing their job. So Christian Stickney, if you ever run into him, I mean he's the guy, and occasionally he's going down to Boston to evaluate dogs on behalf of the Boston Police Department, so we're lucky to have him on staff. Lastly we had National Night Out on, it's a neighborhood program, always the first Tuesday in August, headed at St Joe's again, so I appreciate Commissioner Tyler coming over, and then last week or two weeks ago I held that listening session for four towns, Raymond, Castle, Maples, Harrison. It's the first time, it's something I wanted to do and I found somebody to facilitate that really knew their stuff, so it happened to be Commissioner Tyler's area, so again we had town managers, select chairs, superintendents for the schools in that area, and planning board members, and it was a really good meeting, gave us some insight on what we're doing good and what we should be doing in the future to make a service to that area better. My hope is next year to move it to another area and then the following year move it to another area, just as a report card to figure out what's working and what isn't, so I'll take any questions otherwise I'll shut up. [2:07:23] Speaker C (unidentified): Thank you, we [2:07:53] Speaker B (unidentified): will be having, got the official ministry [2:08:14] Speaker C (unidentified): so one [2:09:54] Speaker A (unidentified): thing, the next meeting is [2:09:57] Liz Blackwell-Moore: actually in October, I jumped ahead, it's it's October, it says it everywhere, it's on the website, it's schedule, so all the public facing information I just want to [2:10:11] Becca Matasovich: make sure so everyone shows up. [2:10:23] Speaker C (unidentified): Says November I [2:10:33] Speaker B (unidentified): Really don't have much to cover except to say it's apple season and traditional times in Maine. I have a daughter who believes that half the pie for breakfast is a constitutional right. That's true. Other than that, best of all, this is kind of a long meeting. And it seemed longer than it was, actually. But, you know, we covered a lot of progress. [2:11:46] Speaker C (unidentified): So, this is Sunday. Sunday,, Sunday. Yeah. So. I kicked off the December, typically three, four times from December to the end of February. [2:18:49] Speaker D (unidentified): Right. And so that's a mental agreement was signed by myself and sent back with a contract of [2:19:11] Speaker C (unidentified): time to send out as when it was sent just got a little bit so by [2:19:52] Speaker D (unidentified): the purchase of sales payment it's not an [2:20:58] Speaker C (unidentified): issue so that's up there [2:24:49] Becca Matasovich: The auditors were here on location two weeks ago going through all of the year-end documents. They were pleased to meet Commissioner Smith and witness the signing of the warrants that they are always questioning. So that was great timing. We have five different audits that we're going through now. We have the regular audit and then the SEPA as a schedule of expenses for federal awards, SEDA which is schedule of expenses for department awards, it's encompassed by the federal for grants, the jail audit, and then there's a state audit, which is for another, that's for Mattie grants. So the audits are really time consuming and expanding. I think that the team did a, the audit team did a great job this year. Last year I had to kind of fight for the federal audit to be done on time and I've received the draft back from them already on the federal audit and we're still working through a lot of things on the rest of the audit. I did our on location with the auditors at the jail cross insurance. They did the district attorney's extradition account without me. By state statute the treasurer doesn't have any authority on the extradition account. So we've gone through most of the processes now. They're waiting for a few contracts and a couple more follow-up items as they're working through. And that's really more year-long process at that point. It's not really just a one-time shot. Once this gets done, the last deadline is March 31st for me for federal audits. And then they start by the Commission that is over, has oversight of our, it starts in April for them to verify our ending, beginning balances going forward. So as soon as we wrap up, it literally, we wrap up in, it starts into double checking where we are in the current year. So that's taking up a lot of time. And then as Jim mentioned, the budget meetings, and then grants as a whole is really expanding, and there's a lot more compliance for that. So in addition to everything else the finance department does, that's kind of the bigger tasks that we're carrying for the last couple of weeks. That's not much of a window for us. We used to have one. That was one of my objections to changing the fiscal year, but financially it does work out better. Time-wise in the finance office, it doesn't work out as well, [2:27:38] Speaker C (unidentified): but well, it is fully staffed. [2:27:45] Speaker G (unidentified): Yes, that will help once we get the training [2:27:48] Becca Matasovich: out of the way and that should definitely help.