Happy Holidays!
As you gather with family and friends for the holidays,
I hope you’ll give thanks for all the hard-working public servants who will be on the job while we take time off. For every fire fighter, police officer, bus
driver, wastewater treatment plant operator, corrections officer, traffic
manager, air traffic controller, or other worker who will be keeping us safe and our
communities running, we offer our most sincere thanks.
Fighting the Opioid Epidemic
One of the great things about working in local government is
the ability to accomplish things for my fellow community members. We tend to
talk a lot about what to do, but it is actually helping people that makes it
all worthwhile. Every time we house someone who’s homeless or get someone into
chemical dependency treatment or find another bed for behavioral health care
assistance, we are easing the suffering of someone’s son or daughter, sister or
brother. As a community, we have many debates about the best approach to
tackling our most pressing issues. I have committed Snohomish County to using
the best data-based approaches to our persistent problems. There are no simple,
quick-fix answers but there are better and worse ways of treating our
community’s diseases.
Earlier this month, I helped launch a new regional approach to
the opioid epidemic. I have partially activated our emergency management
mechanisms in order to better coordinate our response to the epidemic. With our
many partners, including the Snohomish Health District and the Sheriff, we will
now have a mechanism for improved collaboration and communications. This
innovative approach has already helped us identify regional goals and
objectives for the next year. We’ve also been able to have some conversations
about cross-agency collaboration that we haven’t had before.
We are looking at a one-year time frame for this intensive
focus, since we want to make sure we are having an impact. We will continue to
keep the public updated about our progress. We can’t cure addiction but we can coordinate
our response to improve how we fight the epidemic.
On November 21, I held my first Communities of Faith
roundtable. Snohomish County government touches on virtually every part of
life. From our early childhood education activities, to issuing marriage
licenses, to our medical examiner, county government is engaged in vital
services. With our sheriff’s deputies and court system, we also keep all of our
communities safe. All too often, we haven’t had enough dialogue with our
communities of faith. Much like us, they are out in the community serving our
residents not only with spiritual guidance but also delivering services. I
organized a communities of faith roundtable to make sure we understood as a county where our work might
intersect with faith-based work and how we might better accommodate the faith
community.
I have also wanted to reach out to religious leaders who may
have concerns. Whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh or other faith, we want
to make sure we have open lines of communication. I will continue to have an
open-door policy for everyone in our community
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