 Like the call to order, the Sheboygan County Board of Supervisors meeting of July 16, 2019. Certification of compliance with the open meeting law. The agenda was posted on the 12th of July of 230. Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Roll call. 23 Supervisors present. Thank you. Approval of the June 18, 2019 Journal. Surveyser Glavin. Move to approve. Thank you, Surveyser Glavin. Is there a second? Surveyser Hebelink. I support that. Thank you. Any questions or discussion? Seeing none, please push your aye or nay button. Motion is approved unanimously. Thank you. Consideration of appointment by the County Administrator. Board of Adjustments. Mark Fahler, a reappointment. We need a motion on that. Surveyser Conradie. Thank you. Surveyser Conradie. Supervisor Testrude. Mr. Chairman, I'll support the motion. Thank you. Surveyser Testrude. Any discussion or questions? Seeing no lights, please push your aye or nay button. Appointments approved unanimously. Thank you. Presentation. We have a listen presentation. It's a video presentation regarding domestic violence. I believe Judge Persec is here to introduce a judge. Thank you for having me this evening. My name is Rebecca Persec. I'm a court judge, and I've been a judge for four years. Before that, I was the court commissioner for 12 years. A lot of people don't know what the court commissioner does, and I would say it's like being a junior judge. It's a good way to describe it. And so as a court commissioner, one of the things I did every day was initial appearances in criminal cases. And every day, in Sheboygan County, we had at least one domestic violence-related case, oftentimes more than one. And that really shocked me. Yeah, how prevalent it was. Excuse me. And as a judge and a court commissioner, I received a lot of training, and all of us do, on the effects of domestic violence on children. And I'm not talking about child abuse. I'm not talking about children who are the target of violence. I'm talking about children who are witnessing it in their homes. And those effects can be devastating, but they're not well-known. And so the film you're about to see brings awareness to that issue. And I think it's very important. It was developed by Chloe Bone, who you see on the screen. She is a high school student, or she was. She just graduated. And all through high school, she volunteered at Safe Harbor, our local domestic violence shelter. And while volunteering there, she met a lot of children exposed to violence and really wanted to help them. She developed a passion for helping them. And so she's developed this film, and in conjunction with the film, a website to bring awareness to the issue. I can't take any credit at all for what she's done. I didn't know her before a couple months ago, but once I saw the film and saw the website, I realized how important it was. And I've shared it with as many people as I can. And to quote District Attorney Yermansky, we need to get this into the hands of children. So whatever you can do to help that in that capacity, I hope you will do. I hope you will see the value in this film and the website as well, because I honestly think it has the potential to save lives. And the website is unique. It's at discoverlisten.com. It's very unique because it's designed for children to use. It's not designed for adults. It's designed for children to connect them to resources and also to give them a forum to anonymously share their stories and help process what they're going through. And by doing that, help offset the negative consequences. So again, thank you for allowing me to be here tonight. Enjoy the film. Thank you, Judge. I'm here to present a project with a childhood domestic violence called Listen. Listen would not be possible if not for the Innovator Fellowship Program, a collaboration between the Boyd & New York High School and Jake's Cafe, where a selected group of students can pursue an artistic vision through a year-long project of choice. Childhood domestic violence is when a child in the home witnesses domestic violence. And what you'll see in the film is that these kids, which is witnessing domestic violence, the impact is just as great as if the child had been abused themselves. Four years ago, I started volunteering at St. Carver and I have met so many children who really need help. I believe the first step in helping children is listening to them. So without further ado, I present to you Listen to Me, a short film. Have you done school for the day? I haven't done school for the day. I lost my little bunny. I made him forever. We just had a puppy, too. She's really cute. I like to play a lot. I had an amazing childhood. But in the past few years, I have met so many kids who cannot say the same. So I created this film to uncover this scary reality that all of these children are experiencing this childhood. So in the film, you will be hearing from the kids themselves and they'll be sharing stories and experiences and really pieces of their lives with you so we can better understand what these kids are going through. And then you will also be meeting and hearing from some professionals in the field who will talk about the impact of childhood domestic violence as well as what individuals you and I are going to be doing to help as well as communities and society as a whole, what we could all be doing to help these kids. Once my dad, when my mom came in my dad's princess, he just started pulling my mom's hair. And he acted. She tripped. I saw him push her. He said, I'm ready for crying. He needs to hurt my mom. I just wish he would leave us alone. My dad, he was never nice to my mom. He always hit her on the head and called her mean names. He comes around from time to time. Our people gets worse every day. My mom's boyfriend got arrested and we had to stay with my grandma. My mom was upset about it for a while. My mom is working a lot now but I hope we stay with grandma's honor. I like to go in the closet and put headphones on. And then my mom had been with us and scared me a lot. Yeah. There was this one man about three years ago that my mom dated. He made her go to the hospital and I'm still afraid he's out there and is going to hurt us. I mean, she broke bones and stuff from him. I was so scared that she would actually die. I lived with my grandma for three months until my mom got better. Three months is a long time. I missed my mom a lot. Lesson for now is really expensive headphones though. I can't hear my mom being hurt. My mom felt crying sometimes and has dreams about daddy. I got to spend a lot of time with my grandma and that made things easier. My mom's boyfriend moved out but my mom and I still get along that well. I don't have a dad anymore because he was hurting us. I got stuck down on George and he added another word to it. His name is George too. So he doesn't get scared when I'm scared. Sometimes he's mad at me too. She's weird that I don't get hurt too. Yeah. My mom and dad fought a lot but now we're at this place and my mom lives here and my dad doesn't. So they don't fight anymore. It's really scary when they fight. If I get hurt protecting my mom I know she wouldn't do anything to me. She's my mom. Call the police. That's what I had to do. My mom's wife and I went to jail because of it. Don't go and become the adults when you get hurt. Don't call anyone or use your phone. That's why I got hurt many times. Really hurt. I have a scar on my wrist. I want to die so I don't know. I don't think it's a good option but what else is there to do to make it stop? Doesn't end. Going to a shopper. What is that? Often when those cases come in the message is that the children were asleep or they didn't see it or they were somewhere else. But what we find is when we do actually when we do actually get those children in the door they have seen the violence and they either have seen it on this occasion or on another one or they could have used themselves. This is the fights in my mom and me. He hasn't hurt my little sister or brother yet though. So, whenever there is a case of domestic violence when we know that the adults involved have children we are always advocating that those children make it to a child advocacy center like here to have an ambulance to have medical exams to find out what they know what they're supposed to and make sure that they and their bodies are safe. So, a lot of times kids are told that they need to not talk to anyone about this. My stepdad threatens me not to talk about it. A lot of fearful tactics put into that and sometimes the abuse there sometimes just the shame and guilt of the domestic abuse happening at home. The abuse. He tells me no one will believe me that I will just disappear. For years and years we used to think that if a child maybe didn't see or hear things that they were not impacted we know it's actually the exact opposite. It hurts to watch. My older sibling has tried to protect me from seeing and hearing the abuse. Domestic violence affects all race socioeconomic status, sexual orientation. So, there's no looks at the domestic violence. All of these things. So, all of these ways of role are stuck with them. So, they're not focusing at school because they couldn't sleep last night or have a fight and they hurt it all. Or they can't focus at school because they're worried about mom being at home right now and what is mom going through if dad's there or if the abuse is there and if the other victim is there and you know, is mom going to be alive when I get home? Is mom going to have bruises? Is mom going to be crying when I get home? All these different things. That's what they're worried about in our schools. Sometimes after school I was scared to go home because I knew before I went to school that day that things weren't going well. And when I was at school I was worried about my mom and my baby carers. So, you can just imagine the impact of a kid who's staying at school all day and they're not listening, they're not paying attention. And school is not their main focus because survival is our main focus. I mean, you have to stay alive. That could be acting out behavior, lack of attention, inability to sit still, sometimes looking like ADHD. And so we know the mama is in a domestic violence situation and is carrying a child that that stress can be from toxic, not only to her, but to her unborn child. Long term could be going toward homelessness, drug abuse, alcoholism, violence themselves because if you've experienced violence many times they also will, you know, force their future and that's what they know. A child's alarm system, if you will, becomes over-activated and we see, you know, the fight-flight-freeze response becomes strong. You know, it's on all the time. I'm afraid for my mom's life and my own. They're not calling 911 that day. My mom told me to, calling 911 with my dad seemed really cruel, but who else was there to help my mom that day? It was me and I failed her. I was five. Who left my dad after that day? That's when he came to the shelter. You know, communities should have places like St. Barbara to help kids and to be able to support them in their healing journey from experiencing traumatic incidents. And so every community should have an agency like that. I think we need to support the agencies that do provide direct services. We're comic-based agencies, so we're a compliment agency and we're required by state staff to provide services, but I think that the general public does not realize how much the services that were directed for crime victims, like housing, the shelter of advocacy, community-based organizations, the critical they are and the services they provide. If they're not funded fully, that means the groups aren't available, the support services aren't real, people can either do the needs and deal with the trauma they've been through. The answer for that would be is A, to be supportive and believe them, so again, creating that one person, creating a safe person for them to tell that to. But it also really provides support that looks like I don't get to live your life, I'm not here to make decisions for you, but I want you to know that I support you and I'm here for you and I want to listen and I'm not here to tell you what to do, but really just to be an open safe space, a safe container for that person to come to so that they can have a safe place to fall, but then also what that does is allows them to continue to share with me safely. Also, some other options is reporting it to the police, reporting it to CPS. Sometimes people, they can do an investigation and they can look into it. Also, it can be very frustrated if nothing comes of that. From my experience, sometimes they need to show a pattern that we need to hear, which is very frustrating, but if you report it once and then they tap into it, don't just be discouraged by that, continue to report as things are being told to you and that can create a case and it can create a larger change. You can help her. What you have to look at is that if it's a child that's in danger or you're concerned for child safety, you can make an anonymous report to social services and they can by law protect your name as a reporter. So I think that's one avenue or if you're concerned about child safety, that's why it's made that way. I think that if you're acting in good faith, I can't comment or say legally whether there's ever any ramifications because I know someone can file a lawsuit for slander. Like, Civil League, they work in the criminal world but in the civil world, you can't file a lawsuit because one was called to slander you. But I think that you have to look at what actually you take, what evidence you have at the time and the best knowledge of what we're trying to do in prevention or in safety. It was revolutionary in that it changed the arresting procedure in domestic violence cases. It's been revised over the years but it meant simply that it wasn't an officer's discretion on whether or not someone should be arrested. If there was probable cause of a crime committed, an arrest had to be made. So there were no more who walked for, let's go to the states and where else until they can think clearly or let's ask the victim if they wanted to press charges. It took all that off the table and the victim no longer had to press charges. If there was a crime committed or a probable cause of a crime that had been committed, the officer had to make an arrest. We have great officers that work really hard to get to the common situations and to learn what's going on in the situation but this gave them the mandate to arrest the person that was primarily responsible for what happened. Believe them. I think listening to children and believing children is what we can all do to help keep children safe. There are too many examples in my career. I've interviewed over 3,000 children. I've interviewed and I've been doing it about 20 years. So in that time I've seen a lot of occasions where people don't believe kids. And not just parents but maybe investigators, maybe teachers, maybe social workers or interviewers. So I think the first thing we have to do is really listen to kids and give them a chance to tell us things. Not just how was your day was it good, was it bad but really saying tell me all about what happened and giving children a chance to talk about their experiences. I think that that's something that every single person can do. That doesn't cost anything. Doesn't take any extra skill set. We can all start by listening. This is so important because before any other solutions can happen people need to understand what is happening to their children. Then the next step is looking at resources. How is it available to kids? How do we support the resources that are available and how do we make them accessible to children? This thought process maybe wants to do something more than just the film and that's why with the help of web designers at Jake's Cafe I created the website Discover Listen. The URL is discoverlisten.com and it is accessible to anyone as there is no login or password needed. The website has three functions. First is prevention education. Here a child can learn what domestic violence is if they are victim and what to do if they are victim. Second function is called get help. Here a child can see what resources are offered in their county and then find the help that is closest to them. They look at a map of Wisconsin and they can find the county and then the region that they live in. Below the map is each region listed with all of the resources below. So for example if I am a child living in Shawaitan County I can see that it is a part of the southeastern region. So I can go down on the southeastern region and all the resources are listed in various counties but since I am from Shawaitan County I can find our State Carver and then turn off all of their contact information is there as well as services and that goes for all of the all of the resources listed will have that contact information the county and then the services listed. Next we have shared stories. So here in this section you can read the experiences of other victims and if they choose to they can share their own. All authors are anonymous and every story shared is proofread to ensure that this resource is being used appropriately and safely. The purpose of this section is to let kids know that they are not alone and that there is a community to listen. Other pictures include a 24-hour domestic violence helpline that can be found in the upper right-hand corner. Next to the helpline you'll find a quick exit where a child can click to quickly exit the site for whatever reason if someone is going up behind them and they don't want someone to see that they are on the site for whatever reason or and they're afraid of someone seeing them on the site they can click this quick exit and it will take them to the weather service and then you see that it turns their old tab just to Google so there's really no way for someone to know that they were on the site. So let me just go back discover listen.com and then the very last feature is at the very bottom there is a contact form and this can be used if you have a question for anyone children or adults anyone can use this for questions sharing stories or information or contacting me about scheduling a presentation. I am in the process of scheduling more presentations both public and private so if any of you or an organization that would be interested please let me know. This concludes the listening presentation. Thank you all so much. Thank you Judge Persick for introducing that very important valued video and please thank Chloe I know she couldn't make it here tonight until really she did a fabulous job on behalf of the board okay next we'll move on to public addresses we have none letters communications and announcements we have a handful of resolutions one is from Door County Board of Supervisors in support of revising and amending statutes related to court fees and costs in probate and juvenile court I'll refer to the law committee next is a resolution from the Portage County Board of Supervisors in support of increased funding for child protective services right we received that before so we received that for information next from Winnebago County resolution from the Board of Supervisors in support of increased funding again for child protective services once again we'll receive that for information and finally a resolution from Winnebago County and we'll move on to the next resolution resolution from Winnebago County in support of a National Estuarine Research Reserve designation for Northeast Wisconsin and we received that for information too as we saw that in March that's it County Administrators Report Adam is going to pass on the County Administrators Report because of the length of the video and the timeliness of that consideration of committee so much applause that's alright consideration of committee reports executive committee resolution number six regarding improving standard intergovernmental agreement for 2020 county sales tax revenue sharing recommendation to adopt Supervisor Gehring Mr. Chairman I move for adopt resolution number six thank you Supervisor Gehring Supervisor Distroty this is the exact agreement that we've every year we've had there's no changes in this from what we've done the last three years now but there is one change that we're making going forward and we had promised the locals this we had shared 1.5 million dollars the first two years and this third year now it's going to be increased to 1.6 million so they'll divide a little bigger piece of the pie than they have in the past so just for that information which is what we had told them as our numbers went up too so okay any other questions on that or seeing no lights please push your i or nae button that motion is approved unanimously thank you consideration of committee reports finance committee resolution number five regarding authorizing creation of joint county library planning committee recommendation to adopt Supervisor Gehring Mr. Chairman I move for resolution number five thank you Surveyser Gehring support that motion sir thank you Surveyser Obler any questions or comments seeing none please push your i or nae button the motion is also approved unanimously thank you turn the gavel over to the vice chair resolution number seven from the finance committee regarding disallowance of brown claim against Sheboygan county resolution number seven will be referred to the executive committee ordinance is introduced ordinance number three from the executive committee regarding amending supervisor and county board chairperson compensation ordinance number three will be referred to the finance committee and ordinance number four from the transportation committee regarding designated all-terrain vehicle routes and regulating the operation of all-terrain vehicles ordinance number four will be referred to a joint meeting of the planning resources agriculture and extension committee and the law committee final item is adjournment Supervisor Bemas I move we adjourn thank you Supervisor Bemas Supervisor Glavin second thank you Supervisor Glavin please vote we are adjourned