Lewis County Begins Talks on Five-Year Strategic Plan Implementation

Lewis County officials began talks this week on how to implement their new five-year strategic plan, which lays out long-term goals for economic development, housing, public health, organizational efficiency and public safety.

According to Mackey Smith, who works with the consulting firm that helped develop the plan, jurisdictions tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in the first year and underestimate what they can accomplish in five years. 

“Right now, our plan is to try to take small bites, get some low-hanging fruit, achieve some success in 2021, and take off our training wheels in later years to really try to make this thing sing,” said Lewis County Manager Erik Martin, noting that twice-monthly meetings with department directors will likely now have time carved out to discuss long-term objectives.

This year, much of the “low hanging fruit” includes improving internal processes to maximize efficiency. Streamlining the county’s permitting processes, for example, could accelerate infrastructure projects key to economic development. 

Public Works Director Josh Metcalf told county commissioners that outreach has already commenced between different towns to identify infrastructure priorities.

“We can start to create a sort of a map in your mind of where those opportunities really lie and how far it takes to get there,” Martin said. 

And in terms of public safety, one short-term goal for the county is maintaining adequate funding for the sheriff’s office and potentially adding an additional revenue source, although it’s unclear what that may look like.

Public Health

A major goal discussed by the county this week is addressing social determinants of health. Public Health Director J.P. Anderson defined the term as “anything that impacts our health that is not our biology,” including air quality, access to healthy food, home life and adverse childhood experiences. 

Adverse childhood experiences, he said, is something the county needs to hone in on, especially considering the “acute” increase in local youth expressing suicidal ideation, Anderson said. 

It’s an issue health care workers have documented throughout the pandemic.

“It’s remarkable how those adverse childhood experiences, after you add those up, will actually stair-step into things like long-term health outcomes around cancer, heart disease, substance abuse, mental health issues,” he said. “You can really draw a clear corollary between those things.”

As a starting point, the county intends to collect more quantitative data on youth in the area. The state’s healthy youth survey will help, as well as more local surveys conducted by community clinics. The hope is that hard data will help inform long-term initiatives.

Internet

One of the county’s most high-profile goals — expanding internet access — is largely at the whim of outside forces for the time being. For example, officials are keeping their eyes on a bill in the state legislature to allow public utility districts (PUDs) to provide internet directly to customers. Lewis County Commissioner Lindsey Pollock testified in support of the bill, which she said could help overcome major barriers private industry faces in serving rural customers.

But until the bill gets the governor’s signature, the county doesn’t have solid plans to significantly expand high-speed internet. The goal falls under a broader “economic development” category, but no specific remedies are listed in the plan. 

Officials again brought up Space X’s Starlink project — a cutting-edge network of low-flying satellites — as a potential “gamechanger” for the community, especially considering how rugged terrain makes it difficult to lay fiber across the region. But the project is in preliminary stages. 

The county’s IT director, Matt Jaeger, is one of few Lewis County residents participating in the service’s beta testing. 

County officials hope to have more regular conversations about the five-year strategic plan, potentially creating single-page score-cards for the public to track their progress. 

“The only way this plan is going to not sit on the shelf and collect dust is if you hold me accountable, I hold you accountable, staff holds me accountable … and then as a collective group we all support each other,” Martin said.