Council 7-28-2026 [3:17-6:20]

Thank you guys, Tim and Jeff. First thing on the agenda is the approval of minutes from the June 23rd meeting. Make sure we've all read those. Move to approve. I got a first and the second, from Janie. Any further questions or comments? All in favor of motion, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? OK, that one is passed. Pointless. Judge Gowdy. How's Judge Gowdy? Excuse me. Do you have any other members of the council? We'll run them down their own bottom. There it is. There you go. OK, thank you. Good afternoon, early evening, members of the county council. I am here to make a request for an additional $15,000 to the juvenile detention funds. In recent years, we did cut that budget back quite a bit. And we have had a year where we've had a couple of youth. It's really just two youth that had to be detained and secured attention for a long period of time. We take very seriously juvenile justice and JDAI in particular, detaining only the right youth, the ones that have to be in secured attention. Cost is one of the reasons, but mostly because of the harmful impacts to the youth. We can keep them here safely. We do that. So I want you to understand that we do take those decisions very seriously. We just had a couple of youth that had to have long-term stays. They had nowhere else to go for the safety of themselves or the community. And if you want to have more conversations about that, of course, I can't reveal details of who they are, but I can tell you why it happened and why this happens sometimes. But we do need $15,000 additional. And the one other thing I want to point out to you is that our juvenile probation officers, one in particular, Ms. Mesman, who's the director, takes a very seriously trying to recoup those funds for the county. So she asks often that if the parents have the ability to pay, that they pay back to the county, those secured attention fees. Now, I make that determination if they have jobs and it's not going to put them under, and they won't be able to be their children, obviously. They don't have the ability to pay if that's the situation. But if they can pay, they're working adults, and they have the ability to pay those back. I do order that. And Ms. Mesman, as well as other juvenile probation officers and the probation office, Lawrence County probation department, has collected in the last two and a half years, almost $30,000 back of those funds that were expended by the county to house juveniles and secured attention. So I just want you to keep that in mind. We don't do this willingly at all. It's very serious to us. One of youth has to be to take. But we are asking $15,000 additional. I welcome any questions that you might have about that.