Steering committees explore new legislative policy

@NACoTweets Health Policy and Human Services and Education Steering Committee prepares for aging baby boomers 

NACo’s 10 policy steering committees and their subcommittees meet during the conference to consider new legislative policies.  Their agendas include briefings from top public and private sector representatives on issues of critical importance to counties. Following are a few examples.

 

LUCC Steering Committee

HUD Secretary Julian Castro updated the LUCC Steering Committee on his department’s initiatives to improve the quality and access to public housing.

“When a person chooses a home, they’re really choosing much more than that,” he said. “They’re choosing their job opportunities they’re choosing their children’s schools, their access to food in that neighborhood. When folks are discriminated against when looking for a home they’re also denied a fair chance to succeed in life.”

The department published fair housing guidelines at the end of 2015 and released an assessment tool for local governments to use in preparing their fair housing assessments.

In response to less than one-third of Community Development Block Grant funding being spent on actual housing, rather than infrastructure projects, HUD is working with county executives, mayors and city council leaders to design plans to use federal resources in a “more focused way.”

He called on county leaders to commit to ending homelessness, and offered a tip.

“The most successful approach to addressing chronic homelessness involves putting individuals and families directly into affordable units,” he said, noting that 21 communities and two states have effectively ended veteran homelessness.

Castro stressed the importance of connecting public housing residents, children particularly, to the Internet.

He touted HUD’s measures to improve options for people with criminal records. Those include connecting them to reentry services, barring landlords from using arrest records to keep someone from renting a home, and ending the one-strike policy for drug offenses and offenders’ families that would disqualify them from public housing.

Public Lands Steering Committee

When public lands issues got a national media spotlight, it was far from what anyone involved in policymaking would have wanted.

Public Lands Steering Committee members got a firsthand report from Harney County, Ore., Judge Steven Grasty on the 40-day armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  Grasty explained that without the intimidation factor, the occupation of the refuge would have been completely different. The presence of firearms in both the tower on the refuge, and out and about in town muddled the issue of federal land ownership in a rural county to a wide audience.

“You don’t put guys in a tower with long-ranged weapons and not call it an armed takeover,” he said. “(Ammon Bundy) saw a welcoming community and saw it as support (for his cause)...and you had armed men from this group guarding the Safeway. That’s intimidation.”

Grasty pointed out that outsiders made up most of the force, noting he picked out 25 familiar faces in a protest of more than 300, but it was an impetus to encouraged elected officials to keep a closer eye on what is happening in their counties.

“Do you really know your community?” he asked. “Are there groups you aren’t talking to? If someone starts up a committee of safety, you have to be very attentive to that.”

He did find a silver lining: a boom in attendance at County Court meetings.

“We usually we have 4–5 people in the meetings, now we have 35,” he said.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell

U.S. Forest Service Chief Thomas Tidwell said his department was running smoother and more efficiently than ever before.

The big figure: the forest service’s timber harvest has reached its 1998 level, despite cutting more than one-third of its staff. And, of its 328 decisions in 2015, only 10 were challenged in court.

How is that happening?

“We’re doing a better job bringing everybody together, providing the time so that everybody has a chance to contribute, and reach an agreement without going to court,” he said. “Once you start to build that trust, the next time it gets a little easier, a little faster, and you’re able to take on much larger projects that really make a difference.”

Regarding President Obama’s 2017 budget proposal, “I have to feel fortunate that the budget is flat,” he said. “The only place there’s significant increase is fire suppression.”

The research and development budget has been cut, to Tidwell’s chagrin, because wood has a future as a green building material, as demonstrated by the construction of a 12-story wooden high rise in Portland, Ore.

At the same time, he doesn’t want commercial interests driving forest policy.

“We have to change this perception that we’re cutting trees for somebody to make money versus we’re harvesting timber to maintain our forests,” he said. “Without management, the science is so clear, were going to continue to lose the productivity of our forests.”

Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze

Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze explained the bureau’s revisions to resource management plans (RPM). Dubbed “Planning 2.0,” it aims to increase public participation in the planning process and ensure the most up-to-date data is used.

“It has taken us 8–10 years to complete some RPMs and cost $1 million a year,” he said. “It’s too slow, people have a hard time tracking their comments and if they have any influence in the process.”

One immediate change is a small-scale release of planning options before they are developed to draft form.

“It’s a halfway step,” Kornze said. “We come back to the public have them give us a gut check, if these options we lay out and our justification are reasonable. There will be instances where we have to start over, but doing that later on kills the public participation. And new information comes to us later on.”

He touted the development of solar power facilities on BLM land, all of which have begun in the last seven years, as “providing an onramp for a lot of rural communities to get into the energy game.”

Health Policy and Human Services and Education Steering Committee Breakfast Roundtable: The Economic Impact of Aging on Counties

Convened by the Health Policy and Human Services and Education steering committees, and the Healthy Counties Advisory Board the roundtable featured expert discussions about the challenges counties will encounter as the baby boom generation continues to age.

Already at 14 percent of the population, those aged 65 or older are expected to double by 2050.

The older population is increasingly reliant on Social Security benefits as their sole source of financial support, according to Dr. Peter Arno, senior fellow and director of health policy research, University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute.

Arno’s Regional Social Security Support Index, which measures the dependency of the older population at both the state and county levels, shows lots of diversity among and within the states.  North Dakota, for example —which was the only state to reduce its dependency on Social Security benefits — still has pockets of counties where dependency remains high. Overall, however, the index shows that dependency has shifted dramatically since 2008. “Social Security plays an incredibly important role for income support and poverty reduction,” he said.

He pointed to research that shows how Social Security benefits cycle through the economy, providing important economic benefits in communities.

He believes Social Security is very stable. He said as much in answer to a question about the fund’s long-term prospects.

“Social security is extraordinarily well-financed despite what you hear in the media,” he said. It’s 100 percent solid through 2034. After then, estimates project 20 to 25 percent reductions, but that’s very unlikely. “It’s never been allowed to happen before,” he said.

What changes does he see in the future as the aging population continues to grow? More resources will need to be directed towards the aging population and developing an infrastructure in communities to support its aging members.

He was asked how to improve Social Security’s  solvency. “Lift the cap on earnings like was done with the Medicare tax in the mid-1980s. That would solve 80–90 percent of the solvency issues.”

The most repeated take-away from the discussion about health care for the aging population: health happens outside of acute care facilities. Chronic conditions must be managed; transportation must be available for doctors visits; meals provided for recently discharged patients and community infrastructures developed that encourage exercise of both brain and brawn.

Dr. Joseph Agostini, national medical director for Aetna Medicare, suggested several ways to help improve the quality and cost of health care for the Medicare population.

First, ensure access to primary care physicians for wellness and prevention services. Think about how to develop liveable and walkable communities for older populations. Next, identify and engage people with chronic conditions to help them manage their conditions better. Encourage coordinated and follow-up care as people transition from a hospital to a nursing facility to their homes. And finally, he advised making certain there is a palliative care system in the community that stresses care for the whole person as they become closer to dying.

Charlie Ban and Bev Schlotterbeck, County News staff, contributed to this report.