Lights. Leadership. Action! - NACo Annual Conference Report - Day 4

Bryan Desloge, Leon County, Fla. commissioner, is the new NACo president. Delegates elected Desloge to head NACo’s executive team along with Roy Charles Brooks, commissioner, Tarrant County, Texas as first vice president; and Sallie Clark, commissioner, El Paso County, Colo. as immediate past president. Greg Cox, supervisor, San Diego County, Calif. joins the executive committee as second vice president.

Read about day three and days one and two of the Annual Conference

Delegates at the annual business meeting also adopted more than 100 platform changes and policy resolutions, ranging from support for federal funding for local efforts to address sea level rise to opposing EPA efforts to tighten ozone air quality standards.

Presidential historian and Pulitzer- prize winning author, Jon Meacham and record-breaking athlete, sports broadcaster and author Diana Nyad were featured speakers at the Closing General Session.

Read more about Day 4 activities

Elected and appointed county officials shared their approaches to successfully working with Native American tribal governments within their counties. They also recommended strategies that might work for other communities.

In Building Effective County-Tribal Relations, Gary Shelton provided examples of successful collaboration with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Scott County, Minn., where he is county administrator. The county and tribe worked together realign a road to better accommodate the tribe’s plan to build a housing development. The parties reached a mutually agreeable solution whereby the county would pay to build the road and the tribe would pay to maintain it.

Shelton said that having a good working relationship with the tribe before the road issue came up was one of the keys to their success.

“It’s very important to build those relationships when there aren’t any issues,” he added, “That kind of ongoing and active intergovernmental engagement will not only improve the communication and cooperation, but it can help you to address misunderstandings … that may have developed over the years.”

Scott County and tribal leaders meet at least monthly, along with all cities and towns in the county, school districts, state lawmakers and field staff from their representative in Congress, he said.

David Rabbit, a Sonoma County, Calif. supervisor, said there are five federally recognized tribes in his county and two casinos. “Our history has been mixed,” he said. “I think initially we had some adversarial relationships, a lot of that was due to gaming.  But since then, I think we’ve really come to grips with sitting down and working through relationships … and forming intergovernmental agreements that benefit both parties.”

The national Stepping Up initiative is now in its second year, and gaining support, with more than 300 counties passing resolutions to seek ways to reduce the number of people with mental illness in their jails.

In Stepping Up: Key Considerations for Reducing Mental Illness in Jails, speakers focused on the importance of a supportive environment in which people with mental illness will land after being released or diverted from jails.

Colette Tvedt, director of public defense training at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, pointed out that many of the charges the mentally ill face are misdemeanors, which don’t come with public defenders.

“They’re convinced to plead guilty because they’re told they can go home that day,” she said. “Now they have convictions on their records, they have to pay fines and penalties and if they can’t, they have to go to jail.”

She added that they might then be facing long odds to get decent housing.

Instead, as Whitney Lawrence, program manager for Community Supportive Housing- LA said, they bounce around the most expensive, and least appropriate, services a county offers, rarely getting the right treatment they need.

Corrin Buchanan, diversion and reentry housing director for the Los Angeles County Health Agency that that supportive housing must be an integral part of any diversion plan, along with a coordinated release plan.

“Recuperative care housing, medically-enhanced housing, stabilization housing, they all offer different levels of support for people with mental illness,” she said. “It can be hard to find landlords who are into renting to people who were formerly homeless.”