CESSA - Region 2 Committee Meeting Approved Minutes 11/13/2024

Community Emergency Services and Support Act (CESSA) Region 2 Advisory Committee

Meeting Minutes- November 13, 2024 - 1:00 pm via Teams

Meeting Minutes - Approved by Members 01/08/2024

• Call to Order/Introductions
  • Call meeting to Order by Dennis Duke at 1:05 PM
  • Attendees:
  • Via MS Teams: Dennis Duke, Michael Barr, Zachary Gittrich, Jamal Simington, Rhonda Flegel, Darren Gault, Travis Noyd, Donald Miskowiec, Brandon Miller-Gus
  • Absences
  • Sarah Scruggs, Jodi Mahoney, Brian Murphy, Meghan Moser, Latricia Seye, Sarah Stasik, Christopher Watkins, Allen Haeffner, Steve Delis, Luke Tomsha, Anthony Walraven, Michael Daley, Ryan Beck, Julie Lewis, Imad Khan, Matthew Jackson
  • Guests:
  • Brenda Hampton, Bobby Leebold, Amanda Jennings, Jessica Atassi, Bryan Anderson, Peter Dyer

• Open Meetings Act - Read and notified meeting is being recorded.

• Approval of Minutes
  • September 11, 2024 Minutes - were tabled due to lack of quorum.

• State Updates - Brenda Hampton
  • Brenda Hampton shared state updates as follows:
    • Geo Routing: Vibrant which is the national overseer of 988 has now allowed with the FCC Geo routing by county. What that means is will only receive calls based upon the area codes. By the FCC and Vibrant allowing geo routing, it gets the caller closer to the 988 center in proximity to where they are. They still do not know exactly where the individual is located, so if somebody is in DuPage County physically, but they had an out of state area code, they would get the 988 call center in DuPage County. This works very well for most areas in the state of Illinois. It does not work well in Chicago or Cook County. For Cook County there are two primary 988 Lifeline centers, NAMI of Greater Chicago and C4. They will now cover the entirety of Cook County before they only covered certain zip codes in Cook County. The statewide vendor, Centerstone will pick up in the event that either of the two 988 Lifeline centers cannot pick up a call.
    • Mandatory Trainings reminder - due and must be completed by end of the calendar year. If you have not already received an e-mail regarding that, it's coming from an Illinois.gov address.
    • Zachary Gittrich inquired if the geo routing is automatic or when you call in the computer behind the scene automatically connecting as opposed to they're getting a hold of the call center and then the call center is using geolocate to transfer it.
    • Brenda Hampton responded no it's automatic.
    • Brandon Miller-Gus when does it start.
    • Brenda Hampton responded it started in September or August.
    • Brandon Miller-Gus is there a process in place when that's not happening.
    • Brenda Hampton responded yes.
    • Brandon Miller-Gus shared example 2 days ago our dispatch center received a call from a crisis line in Georgia that was routed there based on the area code. We had to get authorization from a law enforcement to ping the phone and the subject was suicidal and his vehicle was in the middle of a field in rural Minnesota.
    • Brenda Hampton responded that it's only with T-Mobile & Verizon. If the caller has AT&T it's not connected yet.
    • Dennis Duke welcomed Jessica Atassi as one of the new staff in the Crisis Hub.

• Subregional Committee
  • Dennis Duke shared back in September we were able to discuss this at a very high level. At that time, we were awaiting more information to have a bit more discussion. There were some questions about it and then we didn't have our October meeting. We'll look to Brenda for an update on it and potentially answer any questions that the group may have.
    • Brenda Hampton responded in the language Amendment Processor it allowed for the development of subregional committees. Many of us had called in prior to the language change Hyperlocal Level Planning Committees. The subregional committees are very defined in terms of what their roles and responsibilities are. They evolve from the RACs based around the PSAPs and the work that the PSAPs will have to do or are doing in terms of making changes in their dispatch decisions. The subregional committees will be closer to the local areas of responsibilities. The RACs are quite large (RAC 2 is huge) and the planning in one area of your RAC. The opportunity to have Subregional committees is a means of bringing /planning closer to the local community and looking at what the resources are of that local community and the strengths and looking at the PSAPs and any changes that they have in terms of their landscape analysis that was done a year and a half ago. There may have been some changes and may have consolidated some PSAPs, there may have been some mobile crisis response teams that a year and a half ago did not have 24-hour response, which now they do. There may be mobile crisis response teams that now have engagement specialists to call themselves a full team, which before they did not. Things have changed and now has opportunity to look at the resources of the community from a new lens. That's basically the charge of the subregional committees. Membership of the subregional committees we want it to be non-RAC members. We want them to be community champions who can evolve from advocate groups. They can involve law enforcement or other constituent agencies, grassroot agencies, but we want the subregional membership first as it must reflect the requirements of the RAC. It's very detailed in terms of who may be on a subregional committee, but we don't want the subregional committees to be a replication of the RACs. We want new champions to be at the table to be able to give a critical eye in terms of the work that being done at the local level for CESSA implementation. The composition of membership, we would like the Chair or Co-Chair of the subregional committee to be a PSAP representative or administrator. Because of the work that evolves in this change process is centered with the PSAP. The PSAP reports to the EMS directors, the EMS directors provide guidance to the PSAP. The relationship between PSAPs, law enforcement and fire are very ingrained. The representative to chair the subregional committee from the PSAP is not written in stone, but a desire. The membership composition for the subregional committees must have advocates sitting at the table, we must have people representing the disability populations that it will be served by this chair. Reason a chair and co-chair is needed to be available, lend resources to the planning process and Subregional committees have to be in compliance with OMA - this is how the legislation is written. Meaning an agenda must be posted 10 days prior to the meeting. Meeting schedule has to be posted. Meetings have to be recorded. There must be a quorum to conduct business and time allotted for public comment. A requirement of OMA and not of DMH. The formation of the subregional committee will evolve based upon the readiness of the PSAP to move the planning process forward. They will be aligned with the pilot so they will come from power phone. Subregional committees are flexible, a southern regional committee tasked maybe six months or depending on the work may be 2 years. There's no time designated in which a subregional committee can exist. It's geographically based upon the PSAP and readiness of the PSAP. Looking at protocols and scripts and the interim risk level matrix, they may be incrementally phased in. Crisis is now working on a toolkit to provide to the RACs which will help the subregional committees as they start to form the RACs will not micromanage subregional committees. Reviewed the slide of the subregional committee and learning collaboratives noting there may be more SRC developed out of the RAC based on their readiness. We hoped in October and November we could start to identify PSAPs who would be ready to move forward with the creation of subregional committee. Some are there but they're not power phone. The crisis hub is prepared to release next week the toolkit which are the implementation guidelines for the subregional committees hopefully by December.
      • Zachary Gittrich piggybacked off a comment from Rhonda Flegel that SRCs will not be made out of RAC members, makes sense. There's plenty of SRC that have no members that are on the RAC unlike McLean County which has 4 members on this RAC and we all four should be on the SRC.
      • Brenda Hampton responded as long as membership meets the requirement of membership that was on the slide (representatives of fire, EMS & advocate organizations).
      • Zachary Gittrich inquired how to nominate people to be on these SRCs.
      • Brenda Hampton responded that is something your RAC Chair and membership can talk about. How to identify other people in the community.
      • Dennis Duke commented it sounds like more information to come and once we get that, we can begin to move forward. Speaking from our geography we got off to a early jump start with the hyperlocal evolution, but when the SRC track came out we have paused. Pretty certain that's the case across all of region 2. Is there any examples of people moving forward of making progress in the formation of their SRCs that they'd like to share.
      • Benda Hampton responded Illinois Velley Regional Dispatch PSAP which is priority dispatch has been planning and pulling people together. They've talked about how to move forward and consolidate our efforts together to start to be ready when priority dispatch protocol and script changes are finalized to look at those.
      • Bobby Leebold shared we have a pretty good structure with QCOM and working closely with them.
      • Dennis Duke responded good start Bobby.
      • Brandon Miller-Gus responded he's the Director at Illinois Valley Regional Dispatch and thanked Brenda for using them as an example. Just a couple of comments the group that is listed had a meeting since what was deemed our hyperlocal meeting that Brenda was at and we've had 1 meeting since and decided to meet bi-monthly to work through some of the challenges we see with this. Added that after their hyperlocal meeting pulled in the other PSAPs that are serviced that fall within the boundaries of Aruka and North Central and those other PSAPs are power phone. So we have two, parity dispatch and the other 3. We been discussing different statistics and trying to share them with each other about how many calls even outside of the pilot that we feel as if you know would be transferred through power phone protocol or through the priority dispatch system. We have another meeting next month. With regards to the meetings we've found having these meetings we're building relationships with our mobile crisis response teams and have been brainstorming and working on how to help maintain their safety and relationship with them.
      • Dennis Duke inquired of the original timelines, what do you think the timelines should be adjusted to.
      • Brenda Hampton responded people can start thinking about it now. We never anticipated the subregional committees would evolve any earlier than the beginning of the calendar year. Local stakeholders can begin now.
      • Darren Gault commented one of the things we struggle with all the great ideas coming out of the crisis hub with the subregional committees and getting other people involved, but the problem is there isn't legislation to hold hospitals responsible for discissions. If an emergency room physician gives a directive to a first responder paramedic in the field that they have control over their lives. It's a paramedic license that the resource hospital has control over. So they are pretty much bound to the Medical Director's order this individual must come into the hospital and I'm hearing this across the state and causing a lot of problem. I sent a complaint into BRE. This happened to my agency where a Medical Director ordered a patient to come in and the fire department and paramedical were in a bind as there was no law enforcement. The current mental health code and doesn't fit under the future CESSA prohibition of law enforcement involvement. We stood by and ended up having a firefighter get injured while using force on the patient that were being ordered by a doctor in an emergency room over the phone/radio. One of the reasons is the a lot of the Medical Director's are refusing to participate and is a major problem that needs to be addressed by the state.
      • Brenda Hampton inquired if Chief Gault received a call from Bobby Vanbieber.
      • Darren Gault responded no.
      • Brenda Hampton responded the letter Chief Gault sent was taken to a meeting consisted of DMH staff, IDPH staff, Illinois State Police, the Statewide PSAP Administrator, Crisis Hub staff and was discussed at length. Mr. Vanbieber was to reach out to you and will follow up tomorrow with him.
      • Darren Gault encouraged other regions if you're having problems to notify Brenda Hampton with the concerns.
      • Zachary Gittrich inquired via chat if he could get a copy of the complaint letter emailed to members.
      • Brandon Miller-Gus shared via chat they have their EMS System Coordinator and Medical Director at their local meetings.
      • Dennis Duke acknowledged good work from Brandon Miller and regarding the complaint letter, to hold and see who that should be available to since it was a complaint from the Chief to the State of Illinois.
      • Darren Gault responded see where it goes from here. It was just for everybody's awareness at this point.
      • Zachary Gittrich voiced concern of not knowing all the context of the letter.
      • Dennis Duke responded he would follow up with investigation of what or how that letter can be shared and will then be in contact with Zachary Gittrich.
      • Brenda Hampton shared some questions for the RAC members. Who are your champions within your regions/local areas? Who's already organizing and collaborating and how do we get the word out?
      • Zachary Gittrich inquired if the 590's and PSAP's would provide how much funding they think they would need to fully implement CESSA.
      • Dennis Duke responded that question related to funding is much more complicated than as it relates to the implementation of CESSA. Therefore would say that we can ask the 590's to provide that information.
• Next Steps:
  • Next meeting: Dennis Duke shared we'll have our December 11th meeting and see what new information may be available. Have some updates and conversation amongst members of the RAC. Any questions prior to then, please reach out.

• Questions from the Committee
  • None were noted.

• Next Meeting Date
  • Next Scheduled RAC 2 Meeting Date: December 11, 2024 at 1:00 PM.

• Open for Public Comment - No Comments Noted.

• Meeting was Adjourned at 1:58 PM.