Our mission is to improve community safety by providing opportunities for positive change.

You want to make communities safe, you do two things. You fully fund the Minnesota BCA, hard stop. They solve crimes, they help you track it. Then you also have to fully fund community supervision funding, because you get the violators off the street, and you help people that are violating probation, their conditions, and you help restore people.

88% of adult felony probation clients did not have an additional felony-level conviction within three years of the discharge from Community Corrections. That's a statistic in my mind that is really good because your goal is to provide opportunities for positive change, and that statistic, in my mind, identifies that positive change.

Our mission remains the same, to provide services, to ensure basic needs are met, and to protect those who may not be able to protect themselves. But with the fiscal pressures and the scrutiny over human services this year, I decided to do something different. I wanted you to hear directly from the people doing this work every day. Their stories bring our mission to life, and they remind us that behind every budget decision, there is a person whose life will be impacted.

The penalties are really complicated. They're not straightforward at all. Like you said, there are federal requirements on timeliness and eligibility, and everything's set by the federal. Then the state operates the IT system that we must do the work in. Oftentimes, the IT system does not have the capabilities to incorporate these policies, and so workers must do manual workarounds. So that is some portion of it. But it also takes into account client errors. And when clients either erroneously estimate or give us different information, or even on purpose that they give us different information, we can be dinged with the same error. It carries the same weight.

In Community Services' budget, we've put the one-time funding from both those pots, so the roughly 700,000 is in Director Castillo's budget. We have also levied an equal amount and placed it in the general operations budget. Because if you don't do that, and those one-time costs don't continue, you are starting out your 2028 budget needing $700,000 just to replace that one-time money that's gone away to cover '27 costs, not '28 costs.

Public health and environmental health is as important, maybe more important now than it ever was. But that was recognized. Governmental public health has been around since Minnesota first became a state. It was so important to the Minnesota's first legislators that they addressed public health in their very first session in 1858...

Your department will never get credit for the lives that you save. That's not how our society works, right? You just don't get credit for that kind of stuff. But, I like to give a lot of gratitude to the public health nurse group, the home visiting nurse groups, because I see the outcomes that you're working towards, whether that's the breastfeeding rate or the vaccine rate, and all of that really is intertwined.

When we create the budget, we increase rent. So we charge rent to each of the departments, and then that pays for our building services for upkeep and maintenance. And when we do that, that increase, we give that in levy each year. So PHE got a portion of new levy to pay for rent. They also got a portion of new levy to pay for technology costs, which how we spread that to the departments. And then they also received a, this year, as I mentioned, when the budget was first presented by the deputy administrators, that we shared a million and a half dollars in this year's budget between the departments based on FTE for operating costs.

We are appreciative of this collaborative relationship we have with Washington County so that your Extension office can serve as the front door to the University of Minnesota.

93% of Washington County 4-H youth said that they made an impact on those around them, and we know that service learning is a key component of the 4-H experience, and we're trying to measure that through a youth outcome survey that we do annually with our young people in every county.

The mission of the Master Gardener program is to share research-based horticultural knowledge and practices, cultivate diverse collaborations, support project-based volunteer activities, and inspire change to promote healthy people, healthy communities, and a healthy planet.